I

by Toi Derricotte

  i could be cut up & served on her table

  i could go to my father & beg for her life

  i could dance the seven veils while she escapes

  i could give to the poor

  i could close my legs like a hardened corpse

  i could grow into a hag & compare myself to her pictures

  i could eat her while she’s sleeping

  i could put her in the oven & burn her into a lace cookie

  i could roar like a gored dragon

  i could come crawling like a sexless husband

  i could beg her to touch that scratch between my legs which should open in a flower

  ___________________________

  every time i question myself, i say

  mother did not believe me

  she thought i was making up my life to torture her

  i take off the layers for her to see the teeth marks in my soul

  she thinks i can be born fresh once my rotten desires are removed

  the desire to touch

  the desire to speak

  i could clean house until it is empty

  i could put everything in the right place

  but what about the one mistake i always make

  ___________________________

  i could love her

  i could love her every time she is mistreated

  i could love her every time someone forgets to pick up a plate from the table

  i could love her weeping in church with a light on her face

  i could love her stinking of Ben-Gay on the cot waiting for my father to come

  i could love her roaming from room to room in the dark with a blanket on, trying to

  be quiet

  i could love her eating at night, hungrily, slowly, going back for seconds

  i could love her white breasts

  i could love her belly of scars

  i could love her insides which are half of a woman’s

  i could love her with the dead baby in her

  i could love her though the dead baby could be me

  i could love her even if she wants some part of me dead

  some part that invades her with sorrow she never understands

  ___________________________

  for the mystery of her childhood

  for being too white & too black

  for being robbed of a father

  for wearing the cast-off clothes of the rich

  for eating figs & cream on silver that wasn’t hers

  for putting the comb & brush neatly in place because they were the only things she

  owned

  for learning to make up lies & make everything pretty

  (she never believed her own body)

  i could love her ocean black hair

  i could love it in a braid like a long black chain

  i could love her kneeling over the tub cleaning the scum out with a rag

  i could love her trying to hit the flying roach with a shoe

  i could love her standing in the doorway, thinking she’s made the wrong choice

  as frail as i

  as strange to herself as i

  as beautiful as i

  as ugly as i

  i could do all these things & never be happy

  ___________________________

  worse was done to me she said & i never told

  i always told

  in the body out the mouth

  everything from insults to penises

  needed words to make it real

  be still you make me suffer

  i thought it was i who would die

  i thought silence was a blessing

  & i was its saint

  i was prepared for

  a higher calling

  ___________________________

  we are fighting for my silver soul

  like Jacob & the angel

  you are the angel

  i am the young boy fighting for my life

  i am the angel

  you are the young boy fighting for your life

  we mirror each other

  like a beautiful face in the river

  half of us is drowned

  half of us is light

  i reach into your soul & pull out the bone of my life

  ___________________________

  my mother is on my mouth

  like a frog

  be good be good

  she points her finger, that old spinster teacher

  she points her stick at my tongue

  she knocks some sense into it across its red knuckle

  half of my tongue hangs like a limp dick

  a flag of my mother’s country

  half rises like a bridge

  words might leap across that great divide, a daredevil driver

  but i am the driver

  & my mother is peeping out of the back like a baby

  her eyes big & black with fear

  ___________________________

  my mother is on my mouth

  like a gold frog

  she is sparkling & quick as sin

  with terrible humped breasts

  that nothing can suck at

  the black spots on her are universes you could walk on

  if she were flat & sound as a board

  i take her on my tongue like a lozenge

  & roll her around

  then i bite down

  The Origins of the Artist: Natalie Cole

  My father

  was black, black

  as suede,

  black as the ace

  of spades, black

  as the grave. Black

  humbled him

  and made him

  proud. At first

  there was a space

  between us,

  a mirror flashed

  back at me. Then

  his blackness

  entered

  me like God.

  From a Letter: About Snow

  for Chana Bloch

  I am at a retreat house,

  and the nun who runs the house told me to look at my face in the mirror.

  I did, but the only thing I keep seeing is the face of Snow, the huge Pyrenees

  sheep dog.

  He’s so frightened, they can’t let him off his leash!

  His human eyes, long-suffering, like a saint who’s forgotten how to smile.

  I hear the breed is naturally shy, and this one was abused by his previous owner.

  No wonder he backs away!

  But to see a creature so large—120 pounds—so timid.

  Once, they say, scared by a deer, he broke his leash and ran.

  A mile away a woman stopped with her pickup and he jumped right in!

  Who knows why the frightened make decisions!

  Today I jogged with him, his thick rangy self leading the way.

  Now we’re sitting in the shade by the community house while I write this letter.

  Not Forgotten

  I love the way the black ants use their dead.

  They carry them off like warriors on their steel

  backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting,

  dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us,

  to carry them back to be eaten),

  so that every part will be of service. I think of

  my husband at his father’s grave—

  the grass had closed

  over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out

  his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it

  with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way

  we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.

  Grace Paley Reading

  Finally, the audience gets

  restless, & they send me

  to hunt for Grace. I find her

  backing out of the bathroom, bending

  over, wiping up her footprints

  as she goes with a little
r />   sheet of toilet paper, explaining,

  “In some places, after the lady mops,

  the bosses come to check on her.

  I don’t want it to look

  like she didn’t do her job!”

  Clitoris

  This time with your mouth on my clitoris, I will not think

  he does not like the taste of me. I lift the purplish hood back

  from the pale white berry. It stands alone on its thousand branches.

  I lift the skin like the layers of taffeta of a lady’s skirt.

  How shy the clitoris is, like a young girl

  who must be coaxed by tenderness.

  The Undertaker’s Daughter

  • • •

  The dreadful war nature wages

  to prevent the Poet from existing.

  GEORGE SEFERIS, Days of 1945–1951

  Preface to The Undertaker’s Daughter

  Voyage through death,

  voyage whose chartings are unlove.

  ROBERT HAYDEN

  An apology to the reader

  Let me first say that I regret sending this document out into the world.

  And I regret that it has fallen into your hands and that, it having fallen

  into your hands, I am asking you to read it. However, after having

  put it away for years, then worked on it through thousands of drafts,

  I decided that it should be—even must be—given space.

  I do this not as a performance of brutality to which I need your witness.

  I do it because it must exist as a reflection of its contrary. In my body

  the memories were lodged. This writing is a dim bulb on a black cord

  in the examiners’ room.

  I prefer that you do not attempt to read it. I cannot help but feel

  responsible for your discomfort, so as you read you may feel me slightly

  tugging it from your fingers. The revelations are relentless, without

  a whisper of hope. (Without hope, what gives the poet permission?)

  I send this document of torture out because it happened to me and

  happened continuously inside me for seventy years.

  Completing a work of art necessitates a struggle to create balance

  and symmetry. I have been hampered by an idea of perfection. I have

  struggled to please one who mirrors back my unworthiness. But poetry

  comes from inside; it is visceral; it recreates the most primal sense of

  entitlement to breath and music, to life itself.

  I have fixed together an internal form, like a tailor’s bodice. I wear it as

  a self, stiff but useful, pieced together from scraps. Through it, in this

  new incarnation, I am as vulnerable as a self without mirror.

  PART I

  The Undertaker’s Daughter

  I am not afraid to be memoir

  Before the amphetamine of accomplishment; when there was only a

  physical body and a mind circulating through it like blood, with hardly

  a hovering angel, chunky, spirited, too big for her britches, on the

  two-wheeler before the grown-ups rose, driving the neighbors crazy on

  Sunday morning when the neighborhood should be quiet, first tendency

  to test, legs and eyes, standing up on the seat with one leg out behind her,

  one or two hands on the handlebars, like a circus lady riding bareback,

  back to loneliness, back back before angels separated and became the

  mad god.

  I want to go back there, without a platform except that rising of the

  body itself, that challenge up to being, I want to go back to where the

  first and last wisdom forms, the secret self locked in the tentative field

  of protoplasm, whatever was cooled and cooked on the rock, whatever

  mitochondria god stuck his thumb in, back back, I am not afraid to be

  memoir.

  Beds

  Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we

  hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic

  witness.

  PETER LEVINE, The Unspoken Voice

  I.

  The first was a bassinet. I don’t remember what it was made of; I think it was one of those big white wicker baskets with wheels. When I couldn’t sleep at night, my father would drag it into the kitchen. It was winter. He’d light the gas oven. I remember the room’s stuffiness, the acrid bite of cold and fumes.

  My father didn’t like crying. He said I was doing it to get attention. He didn’t like my mother teaching me that I could cry and get attention. Nothing was wrong with me, and, even if I was hungry, it wasn’t time to eat. Sometimes, I screamed for hours, and my father—I do remember this—would push his chair up to the lip of the bassinet and smoke, as if he were keeping me company.

  After a few nights, he had broken me. I stopped crying. But, when he put the bottle to my lips, I was too exhausted to drink.

  II.

  My second was a crib in the corner of my parents’ room. We moved to the attic when I was eighteen months old, so it must have been before that. I still didn’t sleep at night. I’d see a huge gray monster outside the window, swaying toward me and side to side. I was afraid that, any moment, it would swoop in and get me. But I couldn’t wake my parents. What if it wasn’t real but only the huge blue spruce outside the window? If I woke them for nothing my father would be angry. I was more afraid of my father than I was of the monster. If I just kept watching, it couldn’t get me.

  III.

  My aunt brought home a present for me every day when she came from work. I’d wait by the kitchen door as soon as I could walk. Sometimes, she’d fish down in her pocketbook, and the only thing she could find was a Tums, which she called candy. But mostly she’d bring colored paper and pencils from the printing press where she worked.

  When I was two or three, I began to draw things and to write my name. I wrote it backward for a long time: “I-O-T.” I drew houses, cars, money, and animals. I actually believed everything I drew was real; the house was a real house, as real as the one we lived in. I held it in my hand. It belonged to me, like a chair or an apple. From then on, I did not understand my mother’s sadness or my father’s rage. If we could have whatever we wanted just by drawing it, there was nothing to miss or to long for. I tried to show them what I meant, but they shrugged it off, not seeing or believing.

  (This sideways escape—the battle between my father’s worst thought of me and this proof, this stream of something, questioned and found lacking, which must remain nearly invisible—pressed into what leaks out as involuntarily as urine, a message which must be passed over the coals, raked, purified into a thin strand of unambiguous essence of the deep core.)

  IV.

  When I was seven, we moved to the Forest Lodge. We lived in D12 on the fourth floor. My mother and father slept in the living room on a bed that came down out of the wall. I slept on a rollaway cot kept in the same closet and pulled out at night. I helped my mother roll it into a corner of the kitchen, push the kitchen table back and open the cot, its sheets and blankets still tight. (Whatever I had, I kept nice. I had to. My bed was my bed, but it was in my mother’s space. If she needed the space, my bed would go.)

  Someone had given me an easel-shaped blackboard with a sheet of clear plastic that you could pull down and paint on. In the morning, my mother would set it up in a small area between the dining room and the kitchen. She didn’t mind if the colors spilled, if a few drops fell on the newsprint she had put down. After she scrubbed every Saturday, she liked to put newspaper over the linoleum to keep it clean of our footprints. Wednesday, halfway through the week, she’d take the torn, dirty papers up, and, underneath, the floor was like new.

  V.

  Most times I liked my food. I didn’t mind eating until my daddy started making me clean my plate and either struck me off my chair if I didn’t or lifted m
e up by my hair and held me midair if I was slow. He wanted me to eat faster; he didn’t have all day.

  He’d hold me off the floor until I pleaded. I’d sputter in fear and humiliation—I don’t remember pain—but I had to button up before he put me down to do exactly what he had told me to do, fast.

  Slowness was a sign of insubordination. If I missed a pea or a crumb, I was trying to outwit him. I must have thought he was stupid. And if I pleaded that I hadn’t seen the pea, he’d know I was lying. “Your story is so touching till it sounds like a lie.”

  I swallowed it down; I wiped that look off my face. But still he would notice my bottom lip beginning to quiver. This was a personal insult, as if I had taken a knife and put it to his face. If my brow wrinkled in a question—“Do you love me, daddy? How could you hurt me like this?”—this implied I was pursuing my own version of the truth, as if I were his victim.

  It was a war of wills, as he so clearly saw, and these were my attempts to subvert him, to make my will reign.

  He was the ruler of my body. I had to learn that. He had to be deep in me, deeper than instinct, like the commander of a submarine during times of war.

  VI.

  Thinking was the thing about me that most offended or hurt him, the thing he most wanted to kill. Just in case my mind might be heading in that direction, here was a stop sign, a warning: “Who do you think you are?” But the words weren’t enough. They’d bubble out of him like some brew exploding from an escape hatch, a vortex that pulled in his whole body, his huge hands, which grabbed me up by my hair.

  Where could I go? I was trapped in what my father thought I was thinking. I couldn’t think. My thinking disappeared in case it was the wrong thought.

  It was not the world that I needed to take in, but my father’s words. I had to see exactly what my father saw in me—and stay out of its way.

  VII.

  In the morning, I’d fold up my bed and put it away. On those days and nights when my father didn’t come home, we didn’t need the space in the kitchen for breakfast or dinner, so we didn’t put my bed away. I’d make it without a wrinkle, the pillow placed carefully on top, and it would stay in the little space under the window.

  Maybe the black phone had rung saying he’d be late. Or maybe she had put him out.

  I didn’t know how they slept in the same bed because they never touched. Once, I saw them kiss. Maybe it was her birthday or Mother’s Day. They blushed when they saw I saw them.