table, as if in a bunch
whispering. How slender
and artless, how scandalously
alive, each with its own
humors and pulse. Each weight-
bearing stem is the stem
of a thought through which
aspires the blood-metal of stars. Each heart
is a gift for the king. When
I was a child, my mother and aunts
would sit in the kitchen
gossiping. One would tip
her head toward me, “Little Ears,”
she’d warn, and the whole room
went silent. Now, before sunrise,
what secrets I am told!—being
quieter than blossoms and near invisible.
Elegy for my husband
Bruce Derricotte, June 22, 1928–June 21, 2011
What was there is no longer there:
Not the blood running its wires of flame through the whole length
Not the memories, the texts written in the language of the flat hills
No, not the memories, the porch swing and the father crying
The genteel and elegant aunt bleeding out on the highway
(Too black for the white ambulance to pick up)
Who had sent back lacquered plates from China
Who had given away her best ivory comb that one time she was angry
Not the muscles, the ones the white girls longed to touch
But must not (for your mother warned
You would be lynched in that all-white town where you grew up—
The one, the only good black boy)
All that is gone—
The muscles running, the baseball flying into your mitt
The hand that laid itself over my heart and saved me
The eyes that held the long gold tunnel I believed in
The restrained hand in love and in anger
The holding back
The taut holding
The enthusiast
Tweezers & a magnifying mirror
Exaggerate the pores a black hole opens
& pulls my face in a force so great that
My face is pulled apart crushed
Like vanilla wafers (which my mother shaped into pie crusts!)
All those little fragments but one with a hair thick & black like a
Primeval forest that I whack at though it runs away I
Go at it like sex with all my senses including my hatred
Of the beast in me (though it is sometimes as small
As a zygote). Have you ever scrubbed your chin & felt
(With the fat part of your palm) a relentless
Insurgent?
I learned this from my mother
With what enthusiasm she took up her weapons
The exchange
The iridescent skin of a swimmer
Pulled out further by the moon
Gifts from the dead
A student said, I’ve been studying
your line breaks and can’t figure out
how they work. I couldn’t
explain. All those years they
fought their way to the surface
like cats in a bag. But Lucille
must have given me
breath, because after she died, I
noticed my lines
started to look
a lot like hers! She had told me,
when you lose the flesh
you gain more power. In fact,
that’s the only gold
a poet counts on: the power
to give it away. When Ruth Stone
died, she gave me
a new way
to pick up words, like those
silver claws in grocery
stores that pick up
stuffed animals and this time they
don’t leap away. Ruth had said, just
put your hand
up in the universe and a poem
will jump in. It’s crazy
to trust yourself
like that! But, now,
I’m learning how
to live.
Even when she was getting chemo
twice a week, Lucille would go
anywhere they asked—Australia, Alaska—
carrying her thirty-pound purse, which she would never
give up. No matter how we
warned her, she
did it for nothing! On her deathbed, she wouldn’t leave
until her daughters promised,
We’ll be all right. You can let go.
Ruthie, starlit, ribboned
and silked, fragile-skinned, like a coat from a Chinese
wardrobe in the Middlebury
Goodwill, told us
she wasn’t going to
die. That evening,
after we sank her
down in the hole they had
clawed out that morning,
we sat around the table
where Marcia had planed
the pine slats of her casket
just the day before (her last words,
Marcia said, spoken really
to herself, Everyone
has to die), spooning her favorite—
Kozy Shack rice pudding—
right out of the plastic.
Glimpse
Black woman as Magician at CVS
The old woman at the counter sticks her hand in the well of her purse
and sorts through the lumpy dark, pulling out everything she owns
(except money)—a photo of a grandchild, an empty pill bottle, an
outdated coupon—each with a story that she reports to the uninspired
clerk. Finally she pays, turns with her bagged prescription and notices
the long-faced girl behind her, neatly braided and still so small she
fits the tent between her father’s thighs. “Got a piggy bank?” she asks,
whisking out a stack of singles. She lands one—like a card shark—
flat in the girl’s upturned palm.
• • •
The most surprising and necessary ingredient in my mother’s spaghetti sauce
Two cans of those soggy-looking mushrooms that,
for some reason, after hours of simmering, stay
whole, like belly buttons, and give up a woody essence
that fresh mushrooms do not.
• • •
Bad Dad
I thought I had murdered
my brutish father, but here he is
on TV, risen,
with orange Technicolor hair.
• • •
Glimpse
Before he closed the deal, he decided to check it out—“Well, since I’ll be here
a long time, let me see if I like it”—and he plopped down on the earth, feet
crossed, arms propped under his head. I tried it myself, lying face up on
top of him. It was a perfect corner of the sky, bluer than cornflowers, with
fast-moving puffs of whiteness skimming the tops of two splendid pines.
I count on you invisible
I count on you invisible
presence sherbet-colored &
tender receiver, ear
of tissuey blossoms. Who
speaks to me before sunrise? Who
comes with the thunder
of queens? Transparent
gesture for me
who is made of words.
I give in to an old desire
I lost so much
of the world’s beauty, as if I were watching
every shining gift
on its branch with one eye. Because
I was hungry. Because I was waiting
to eat, a self
crawling about the
world in search
of small things. I remember a small thing, my mother’s hat,
a tea
hat or cocktail
hat that sat
on top of her
perfect face—petals, perhaps
peonies, flaming out, like
the pink feathers of some exotic
bird. Her mother
had been a cook in the South. She grew up
in the home of
wealthy white people. Hesitant
toward her own
beauty, unable
to protect mine, there were things
she never talked about. She said silence
was a balm. It sat
on top of her head, something of exaltation
and wonder exploding
from the inside like
a woman in orgasm. One artificial flower
I have desired
to write about for years.
The intimates
The intimates
In the stalls, we ladies hear
each other pee. I watch her
feet. Unashamedly, she
unrolls the toilet paper, thrump, thrump, thrump.
Her shoes are
sturdy beige—perhaps she’s a librarian?
She definitely has a job!—and she pees
solidly, in a forceful stream
that ends with a quick,
assured finish.
• • •
On a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth
I would feel strange to brush my teeth in public, like I was fouling the
sink more than with an ordinary washing. It’s true, you might get shit
on your hands. Still the hands are such pretty little things to wash, so
visible and pink or brown, not at all like the hidden places that you
must scour, digging out threads of meat and torn, sticky shreds of
lettuce, and the tongue (which, in fact, is descended from the same cells
in the embryo that split off to make the sexual organs). I notice her open
mouth, her pink throat, and I dangerously lift a foot and lean.
• • •
Homage
In a marble stall
of the third floor bathroom
at the University of Pittsburgh,
on the wall to your right
as you’re sitting, a woman
has written (with a black marker)
lines of a poem by Lucille Clifton—
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed
—either copied from a book
or remembered by heart,
written with a firm,
defiant hand.
Once Lucille
packed a tent at Dodge
with 20,000 people.
Here she has
an audience
of one, the pee
spilling out, the bowels
with their steamy stink. A slave
might leave such a message
in a secret place
to point the way
North. To every woman
who lowers herself,
pass it on.
Jerry Stern’s friendship
He’s cracked a vertebra
& can barely move; &
when I call to check,
we get to talking about
the time I came to Iowa.
We’ve been friends since
before he published his first book,
before I wrote mine. I was luckier
than the beauties that men
loved to lay,
then bullied after—
I was tongue-tied
around the ones I wanted. But Jerry,
even though testosterone haloed him
like incandescent hula hoops—a light
that made me mad & envious!—
was one from whom I never felt
a spark of murderous heat.
I listened for hours,
for years, to the mind
that remembered everything;
passion that flowed (not as rage,
but as outrage) like honey
from the great hive-
heart of God &, slowly,
trusted. He’s 93—writing
more than ever!—& confesses that
that night, when I stayed
in his upstairs guestroom,
he stood on the landing
turned on as he watched me
climb his old farmhouse stairs.
La fille aux cheveux de lin
It hurts me to lift
the old record from its
paper cover, to bring Walter Gieseking
to life again. The needle
is heavy with pain, and yet it bumps
down lightly, releasing
the sumptuous, thread-fine
brightness pressed
into vinyl
when the great pianist
played for the Nazis. On the cover,
his eyes are soulless, as dull
as one who has given over
his true gift
to the devil. The notes
fly above
the crematoriums—sorrow
you name, sorrow
you are part of—
“The girl with the flaxen hair.”
Lauds
Good morning, fat chair. Your frame is slight-
Ly askew, your wooden bones tilt, but padded
With foam & polka-dotted, you seem sprite-
Ly, good-natured. I’ve known a chair to rise
Out of a night’s darkness & provide a ride
For me, above the furry carpeting, defy-
Ing gravity. Even one cock-eyed, cheap,
Can be a tilted ship climb-
Ing waves of mourning. Whatever light
Shines through this morning’s slatted blinds—
Smoky with undelivered rain—I’ve turned aside
To praise my last-legged you, for (like Jessie
Norman’s lungs) your soul breathes blithe
Operatic air, & your polka dots climb
Atmospheric strophes like poems I memorized
In school. Do not go gentle, fat chair. What we write
About we are, so you are me, plumped with an extra
Twenty pounds, a bear, lumbering. But, in a poem, we
Dance with a relic of imagination &, by imagination, live.
Midnight: Long Train Passing
The steady growl of it, not rattling
the windows, but continuous, like
white noise. I sit in a huge armchair,
hoping it will
go on forever; for,
when I was a child
awake and fearful, I’d hear the whistle
and rumble of a far-off train
and be comforted,
as if it were another person, another body,
and I was, suddenly,
inside it, its heartbeat
trembling through the wood. It seemed
to cover me, like the sheet
I’d pull over my head
so that nothing
could crawl in my ear.
It was a language
that carried me, so that
all the hours, days, and years I
thought I was unworthy, I was not. Instead
there was another self I lived in, like a God
I prayed to by staying alive.
My father in old age
My father enjoyed
such innocent pleasures
at the end, his face
unguarded as a
three-year-old’s—bacon
with tomato on a slice
of thickly buttered toast.
He’d look up and make
sounds from deep
in his belly, MMMMM-
UMPHFFF, he’d sing, extending it, holding
on to the MMMMMs, then letting them go
with a quick staccato. When my father
he beat me, his face never
unclenched itself. His hardest work
never helped him. Then,
at the end,
an unrehearsed joy . . .
A nap
Alone in my house
during a rainstorm
I open the back door so that the
sound comes in &
rain makes a little puddle
inside the screen It is
early afternoon, though dark,
I lie on the bed
& put my papers down beside me I am
light, as if there were no
blame or guilt—light
inside, heavy out—each part
of me balanced, supported.
New Orleans palmetto bug
We . . . feel a kiss on our lips
Trembling there like a small insect.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
1. False Gods
I’m terrified of the one
in my kitchen. It’s as long as my index finger,
& two thumbs wide—so big, so
alive with its bigness, that I can’t imagine
putting my foot on top & pressing—
any more than I could imagine
pressing down
on a hummingbird or newborn kitten.
I’m screaming &
waving my hands, but it doesn’t move. Then, slow
& steady, it starts to walk toward me. I’m yelling,
“You dumb ass, you stupid mother fucker.” I’m so
big, so
powerful, I can’t believe
it won’t
obey me! “Ok,” I say, this time
with assurance, “You better not
go in my bedroom,” but it does the very thing
I told it not
to do, heads straight
down the hall, through my door & climbs up
on the heater
beside my bed. (Imagine
me trying to sleep & feeling
that slight tremble
on my lips!) I grab the heater
& carry it, carefully (I don’t want to hurt
it when it falls!), out the front door
to the porch, begging, “Please, go home
to your own people.” But it holds on,
as if it doesn’t want to leave.
Later, as I’m drifting off,
I hear the long soft clickings
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