Arts
Listening to Cris
Listening
to Cris
Poet Lynn Martin shares her appreciation for Cris Williamson
and the role of Women’s Music in her life
by Lynn Martin
It happened when I was 50. I stepped out of life as I knew it. I walked
off without money or job into the wilderness of modern living. I moved
into a lesbian life, carried there on the sound of Cris Williamson's voice:
"Lean on me, I am your sister; lean on me, I am your friend."
The longing for such a community was overwhelming. Within the notes of
this song nestled the joy of coming home. It was 1985, in the midst of
the feminist movement, and I was a single leaf afloat on a river hellbent
for the sea.
It's 19 years later. It's many relationships
and a whole story of survival later. I have found good friends. I've also
found one or two sisters. Life provides loss and hurt, joy and redemption
no matter what ground you place under your feet. Whatever life is, is
your life. Acknowledging myself as lesbian may be fate, genes or accident,
or all of the above. All I know is I am.
But here was Cris, performing in a
small town in Vermont called Dummerston. Someone gave me a ticket, so
off I went. I couldn't imagine a woman who sold out Carnagie Hall performing
in this small, white Grange Hall that held less than 100 people. It was
of course sold out. Like few other events, the predominance was a white
haired audience. Cris has kept her audience for 30 years.
That's how old her album The Changer
and the Changed is this year. It is still her best selling album.
When I listen to it today, I can still hear and feel the joy that went
into its making. When I first saw her in Burlington, the performance contained
many of the songs from this album. When I first saw her, she was a symbol
of all I wanted to be. I still have that same awe of Cris and her ability
to write songs that reflect my life. But in Dummerston, 19 years later,
she was not a symbol, but a real woman, vulnerable, gracious, scarred
by life, growing older, but still singing.
That, as I sat in the audience and
watched the play of emotions on her oh so expressive face, brought tears
to my eyes in grateful response.
She began the evening acknowledging
her fatigue. Dummerston was close to the end of her fall tour. Initially
her voice reflected this fatigue, but she got stronger and stronger the
longer she sang. A brand new song, "Songbird," has four lines
from Emily Dickinson in it, and if that was all I heard that evening,
it would have been worth a full-price ticket.
Cris talked to the audience between
songs: about growing up on the prairie, about getting older. Her sense
of humor spoke to all of us growing-olders with our bones beginning to
creak and our memories failing. Again, she was breaking the silence. Have
you noticed, there is always one more silence to break? Now it's as an
aging woman.
As I listened, I was completely captivated,
just as I had been earlier in my life. The predominant emotions evoked
in me were joy and sadness. Joy because Cris was herself, or as much of
herself as I can know of any performer, and not a mirror of all I wanted
for myself. Sad because I was older, more battered, less hopeful than
that 50-year-old adolescent I once was. Someone once told me that when
you change your love to another gender, your first relationship will echo
all your teen hopes and fears. It did. Sad because we were still talking
about politics that threaten to disempower us once again. Cris, however,
told us to keep doing the grassroots work, because that's what it's always
been about, and still is. And as I said, she is still singing. I knew
I couldn't do any less. This poem is my tribute to Cris, Holly, Margie,
Damaris and all.
| Like a blue heron
under a wide sky Sometimes / like when the blue heron stands so still the world stops, and contracts to / a blue cascade of feathers, so concentrated in intent / everything holds its breath, I meet someone / dressed in a blue skirt and I hesitate / asking where have I met her before, where have I seen her / standing quiet and centered on her feet, familiar in the way her body / leans toward something I can’t see? Just as the heron / will open its wings and suddenly double its size, / so, also, does she step forward, turn to an audience, lean into song, / doubled with the weight of us all, who yearn to fly. How vulnerable are the creatures of the sky. Visible against a blue so wide, they have no choice but to be who they are, mysterious and connected to the unseen pull of whatever god had the imagination to create / a woman at once so herself, and so much more. |
Lynn Martin is a poet and AIDS prevention worker in Brattleboro.