“i”
new and selected poems
Toi Derricotte
“i”
new and selected poems
Toi Derricotte
Pitt Poetry Series
Ed Ochester, Editor
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2019, Toi Derricotte
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 10: 0-8229-4566-5
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4566-6
Cover Photo: Ted Rosenberg
Cover Design: Joel W. Coggins
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8677-5 (electronic)
For the beautiful children—
Tony, Elliot, Cami, and Julean
and for Cave Canem
and for the mothers and fathers—
Galway, Lucille, Ruth, and Audre
and for Pearl London
and Naomi Long Madgett
CONTENTS
Preface to the New and Selected Poems
Speculations about “I”
After all those years of fear and raging in my poems
After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading
Among school children
As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn’t change
Biographia Literaria Africana
Blessed angels
Elegy for my husband
The enthusiast
The exchange
Gifts from the dead
Glimpse
Black woman as Magician at CVS
The most surprising and necessary ingredient in my mother’s spaghetti sauce
Bad Dad
Glimpse
I count on you invisible
I give in to an old desire
The intimates
The intimates
On a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth
Homage
Jerry Stern’s friendship
La fille aux cheveux de lin
Lauds
Midnight: Long Train Passing
My father in old age
A nap
New Orleans palmetto bug
1. False Gods
2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away
Note
Pantoum for the Broken
The Peaches of August
The permission
The proof
Rereading Jerry Stern
Sex in old age
Streaming
Summer evening at Still Point
Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly
Watching a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God
“What are you?”
The Empress of the Death House
sleeping with mr. death
the story of a very broken lady
the mirror poems
the face/as it must be/of love
doll poem
new lady godiva
The Grandmother Poems
The Empress of the Death House
The Feeding
The Funeral Parade
from a group of poems thinking about Anne Sexton on the anniversary of her death
unburying the bird
Natural Birth
Introduction: Writing Natural Birth
november
holy cross hospital
maternity
10:29
transition
delivery
in knowledge of young boys
Captivity
The Minks
Blackbottom
Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
St. Peter Claver
The Weakness
Fires in Childhood
High School
Hamtramck: The Polish Women
The Struggle
Before Making Love
On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings
Stuck
Squeaky Bed
The Good Old Dog
The Promise
For a Man Who Speaks with Birds
Touching/Not Touching: My Mother
My Father Still Sleeping after Surgery
Boy at the Paterson Falls
Fears of the Eighth Grade
The Furious Boy
In an Urban School
The Polishers of Brass
For the Dishwasher at Boothman’s
Plaid Pants
Books
Allen Ginsberg
On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses
A Note on My Son’s Face
Tender
Preface
Tender
Exits from Elmina Castle: Cape Coast, Ghana
The Journey
The Tour
Tourists’ Lunch
Beneath Elmina
Above Elmina
Slavery
Power
Market
When My Father Was Beating Me
Black Boys Play the Classics
Brother
Family Secrets
After a Reading at a Black College
For Black Women Who Are Afraid
Passing
Bookstore
Invisible Dreams
Two Poems
Peripheral
Bird
1:30 A.M.
Dead Baby Speaks
The Origins of the Artist: Natalie Cole
From a Letter: About Snow
Not Forgotten
Grace Paley Reading
Clitoris
The Undertaker’s Daughter
Preface to The Undertaker’s Daughter An apology to the reader
PART I. THE UNDERTAKER’S DAUGHTER
I am not afraid to be memoir
Beds
The undertaker’s daughter
Sunday afternoon at Claire Carlyle’s
Dolls
Mistrust of the beloved
PART II. A MEMORY OF THE FUTURE
I see my father after his death
My dad & sardines
The new pet
The Telly Cycle
For Telly the fish
Special ears
Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly
On the reasons I loved Telly the fish
Because I was good to Telly in his life,
An apology to Telly the revolutionary
When the goddess makes love to me,
Untitled
The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday
When I touched her
A little prayer to Our Lady
Cherry blossoms
PART III. THE UNDERTAKING
The exigencies of form
The undertaking
Acknowledgments
Preface to the New and Selected Poems
• • •
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.
CZESLAW MILOSZ
Speculations about “I”
. . . a certain doubleness, by which I can stand
as remote from myself as from another.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I.
I didn’t choose the word—
It came pouring out of my throat
Like the water inside a drowned man.
I didn’t even push on my stomach.
I just lay there, dead (like he told me)
& “I” came out.
(I’m sorry, Father.
“I
” wasn’t my fault.)
II.
(How did “I” feel?)
Felt almost alive
When I’d get in, like the Trojan horse.
I’d sit on the bench
(I didn’t look out of the eyeholes
So I wouldn’t see the carnage).
III.
(Is “I” speaking another language?)
I said, “I” is dangerous.
But at the time I couldn’t tell
Which one of us was speaking.
IV.
(Why “I”?)
“I” was the closest I could get to the
One I loved (who I believe was
Smothered in her playpen).
Perhaps she gave birth
To “I” before she died.
V.
I deny “I,”
& the closer
I get, the more
“I” keeps receding.
VI.
I found “I”
In the bulrushes
Raised by a dirtiness
Beyond imagination.
I loved “I” like a stinky bed,
While I hid in a sentence
With a bunch of other words.
VII.
(What is “I”?)
A transmission through space?
A dismemberment of the spirit?
More like opening the chest &
Throwing the heart out with the gizzards.
VIII.
(Translation)
Years later “I” came back
Wanting to be known.
Like the unspeakable
Name of God, I tried
My 2 letters, leaving
The “O” for breath,
Like in the Bible,
Missing.
IX.
I am not the “I”
In my poems. “I”
Is the net I try to pull me in with.
X.
I try to talk
With “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust
Me. “I” says I am
Slippery by nature.
XI.
I made “I” do
What I wasn’t supposed to do,
What I didn’t want to do—
Defend me,
Stand as an example,
Stand in for what I was hiding.
I treated “I” as if
“I” wasn’t human.
XII.
They say that what I write
Belongs to me, that it is my true
Experience. They think it validates
My endurance.
But why pretend?
“I” is a kind of a terminal survival.
XIII.
I didn’t promise
“I” anything & in that way
“I” is the one I was most
True to.
“i”
new and selected poems
Toi Derricotte
joy is an act of resistance
FROM “THE TELLY CYCLE”
After all those years of fear and raging in my poems
How I thrived from the trifles
in my aunt Lenora’s handbag—Tums,
pencils, Lifesavers, fancy
colored cards—how, in the early morning
before dawn, before
my parents rose, her welcoming sheets
hid me from the house’s
storms. She’d listen to
my far-fetched tales
while I (standing on a stool) “helped”
her dry dishes; or, after, when we’d
walk through the neighborhood’s
deep night, with her
teaching me the stars. Or,
from the time I was three
in the printing department
where she worked—my first job
was to watch eagle-eyed and snatch
errant pages from the thundering
printing press (for 10 cents an hour);
our lunches (as exciting as a rendezvous)
at the Broadway Market—corned beef
with fruit punch and a new dill.
The innumerable dresses and coats
she paid months for, in boxes
with large blue ribbons
and tissue paper, believing
in my astounded body’s signs—
that I could be a beautiful woman.
All the years
of fear and raging
in my poems, the years I continued
in thankless silence—until I was empty
of it . . .
A slice of almond cake
from the childless woman next door, a few
fried chicken wings from the mother of a
girl whose name I don’t remember, who fried
chicken the way they must fry it in heaven.
It took so many years, the self
breaking like a pod, so many years
to pull up the details
of cruelties that were so quickly
buried—so that one could go on!—to bring all that
to consciousness, to hold that pain
until it writes a poem, to hold it
for years until you learn both
the holding and the writing, to
hold it like my father made me
hold still my knee when he put the iodine
on it, to hold it
in consciousness while emotions fill up
to the brain’s pinnacle, then, to learn
to feel again in thin streaks—like the dissolving streaks
of a meteor—to see in brief
flashings a form, prying
at memory, fitting each recognition
to a hundred words. You,
the seamstress; you, the parent-
killer; you, the lover,
until all that was never said is
said and said so perfectly
that time itself
changes, as if you
emptied the universe,
and everything started—
but again.
After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading
She sits at the book-signing table with a colorful
African wrap tied around her head, her chin
in her palm, elbow on the table, as if resting her brain
(that silvery Jell-O in its luminous oyster shell), listening
intently to each one of the women who have
come on a church bus in large church hats. They squeal
with joy as they hand her bedraggled books
taken down from their most honored shelves;
and she, who conceived of Maud Martha (that woman who, by sparing
a kitchen mouse, discovered, unfurling, her own great wings
of compassion), talks to each one, letting them
take as many pictures as they like, sandwiched between them—
small, dignified, and perfectly at ease.
Among school children
A great poem is an
unlocked door. Forty years ago,
in Newark, I recited a poem
by heart to fourth graders—
Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait.”
It begins, My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself, and goes on
to unbury that sorrow
from deep in his body:
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
[my mother] ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard (rhyming
the d’s in “word”
and “hard” which, like a slap,
cracks the heart), and ending,
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
> That year, as in many others,
four children had died
in apartment fires (faulty wiring,
kerosene heaters, no smoke alarms,
doors and windows barred
to keep robbers out
had locked the burning in).
Jermaine Grier told us
his mother had been found
dead in an empty lot. He listened
to the Kunitz poem
and when I said take up
your pencil, he wrote:
Pain is to feel with fear.
Sight is to see things you never saw before.
To hear is to hear sound to develop feeling.
To feel is to touch with feeling.
There was drop-dead silence.
Where is he today? Jermaine
Grier, a boy who once heard
a poem and followed it
out of the burning place within.
As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn’t change
I am thinking with sorrow of those who couldn’t change,
of those who committed suicide, of Plath, Sexton, Berryman,
Hemingway with the gun in his mouth;
Ralph Ellison, who would not support young black writers—
they weren’t good enough, he said, not as good as he was—
but never finished his second book;
Anatole Broyard, who couldn’t write the autobiographical novel
he had been paid to write
because he couldn’t write the first truth—
that all those years he had been drama critic
for the New York Times, he had been passing for white.
And there are those who face the truth the first time,
but, when that truth changes, can’t do it again,
as if the old truth has made
a self so vain they can’t let it go.
And I think of the great writers who DO change:
Jerry Stern, in his 90s, writing two new books a year—
his publishers can’t keep up!—
poetry; and prose that I love as much as the old awarded
poetry books, because it bares
the movement of a brilliant mind.
Biographia Literaria Africana
I don’t know why poets love me! Famous
poets, great writers who treat me
as if I’m their equal. In my childhood,
they called me D-head; they said my feet
were gunboats. “Sing so-
lo,” they said, “so low
we can’t hear you.” But
in the pictures I can see that
little light of glad living in my eyes.
Blessed angels
How much like
angels are these tall
gladiolas in a vase on my coffee
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