the pretext of seeing if he had bedsores, or if he was losing weight but,
really, all I wanted to do was fix my eyes on his body—the same big toe
as mine, the same twisted little toe, his thick knees, each like the end of
a club. I stared as long as I wanted, unashamed, unafraid of my great
love, unafraid he would leave me.
My father had lost his sexual beauty in his sixties. But in the days of his
illness his body became lustrous, so full of energy and brightness that it
seemed too hot to put my hands on.
After his surgery he had said, “You’re not going to like what you see,”
but when he lifted his shirt I kissed the long, raw cut, which looked
like two slabs of butchered ribs stapled together, and said, “You’re
still beautiful to me.” I had always loved what he could never love in
himself—even his wounds.
• • •
Though he had been dead for ten hours, someone told me it takes
thirteen for the spirit to move on. So he had not gone yet; he was still
partly there, seeping out in shallow expirations.
Certainly what one sees later, after the embalming, is an object made by
the undertaker; it has nothing to do with the one dead. Though I hadn’t
been with him at death, I was there to see him before the embalming
and, for the rest of my life, to know that look of calm that had come.
My cruel father had looked forward, seen heaven, and sent back this
sign of peace.
• • •
That night I had a dream, but not a dream, for it was as real as this very
moment, with all my feelings in it; and I didn’t have any idea of how
or why or when. Suddenly, as if I had just been born and didn’t know
anything before that, I didn’t feel fear. Nothing else had happened, just
that fear had been sucked out of me, and I didn’t even remember it
happening but just felt gratitude for an absence that made my life—I
swear I am not making a metaphor—feel like heaven.
But as the night went on—it didn’t feel like night, it felt like a trueness
that made everything different and new—a worry began to encroach,
a sliver of gray: “What if this fearlessness were taken away?” When
I woke I felt such joy; I shook my husband and said, “I’m free, I’m
different.” And then I began to put my feet over the side of the bed,
slowly, the ground coming up to meet me and, at that moment, when
my feet touched the floor, something in me said, “Your father is dead,”
and I knew why I had felt so happy.
• • •
I had forgotten that moment until today, that happiness that had
tarnished like silver, like an old old mirror in which I could no longer
see my face. I don’t know why I lost it, why that heaviness came back—
for wasn’t my father truly dead, didn’t I no longer have to fear him?—
but, in a few days, the wonder faded. My mind was not ready for such
light. I had to dig my way out of darkness one weighty grain at a time,
as if a memory of the future had visited.
My dad & sardines
my dad’s going to give me a self
back.
i’ve made an altar called
The Altar for Healing the Father & Child,
& asked him what i could do
for him so he would
do nice for me. he said i should stop
saying bad things about him &, since
i’ve said just about everything bad
i can think of &, since . . . well,
no, i change my
mind, i can’t promise
him that. but even healing is
negotiable, so, if he’s in
heaven (or trying
to get in), it wouldn’t hurt
to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to
enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling
down the list of things i
have to do &
enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring
the cupboards, i found a
can of sardines that
must be five
years old &, since i was home after a long
trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn’t eaten
dinner &, since there was no other
protein in the house,
i cranked it open & remembered that
my dad loved
sardines—right before bed—with
onions & mustard. i can’t get into
my dad’s old heart, but i remember that look
on his face when he would
load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little
fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice
of onion. then he’d look up from his soiled
fingers with one eyebrow
raised, a rakish
grin that said—all
for me!—as if he was
getting away
with murder.
The new pet
i don’t want to worry about a fish yet
here i am when i am tired going down & up two
flights of stairs to bring him clean spring water
to fill up his bowl maybe he looked un-
happy because there was no current—the water was not
high enough to reach the motor—& he has grown used to
the big tank, the heater & water filter, for he began to flip
about & even leap up to my finger when he was hungry.
surely nothing will come to me for doing
good to a fish, & still i do it; though i often wish i had
a mean heart
The Telly Cycle
Joy is an act of resistance.
Why would a black woman
need a fish
to love? Why did she need a
flash of red, living, in the
corner of her eye? As if she could love nothing
up close, but had to step
away from it, come
back to drop a few seeds
& let it grab
on to her, as if it caught
her
on some hook that couldn’t
hurt. Why did she need a fish,
a red
thorn or, among the thorns, that
flower? What does her love have to do
with five hundred years of
sorrow, then joy coming up like a
small breath, a
bubble? What does it have to do
with the graveyards of the
Atlantic in her mother’s
heart?
For Telly the fish
Telly’s favorite artist was Alice Neel.
When he first came to my house,
I propped up her bright yellow shade with open
window & a vase of flowers (postcard size)
behind his first fish bowl. I thought
it might give him something
to look at, like the center
of a house you keep coming
back to, a hearth, a root
for your eye. It was a
wondering in me that came up with that
thought, a kind of empathy
across my air & through his
water, maybe the first
word I cast out between us
in case he could
hear. Telly would stare at that painting
for hours, hanging there with his glassy
eyes wide
open. At night he wanted the
bottom, as if it were a warm
bed, he’d lie there
sort of dreaming, his eyes
>
gray & dim &
thoughtless. For months he came back
to her, the way a critic or lover
can build a whole
lifetime on the study of one
great work. I don’t know why
he stopped, maybe it was when
he first noticed
me, the face above my hand
feeding for, sometimes, when I’d set the food
on top, he’d still watch me, eye
to eye, as if saying, food
isn’t enough. Once, when I
bent, he jumped up out of the water & kissed
my lips. What is a fish’s kiss like?
You’d think it would be
cold, slimy, but it was
quick, nippy, hard. Maybe it was just
what I expected. For all
our fears of
touch, it takes so long
to learn how to take in.
When he stopped coming
to the top, I guess I did all the wrong
things—the fish medicine
that smelled, measured
carefully for his ounce of weight—
for his gills worked
so hard & he lay still,
tipped over slightly
like a dead boat.
How do you stop the hurt
of having to breathe?
After, I took him to the middle of the
yellow bridge right near the
Andy Warhol museum—
I had put a paper towel
in a painted egg & laid him in it—
&, at the top,
I opened the casket & emptied him out
into the water.
Special ears
I liked him for his tailfin, which was long like a mermaid’s & flowed like a
silver blue ruffle in the water,
larger than you’d expect a little fish’s tail to be—
generous, excessive, a bit astonishing, like a girl with too much hair!
Sometimes he would rise like a submarine, straight up, as if he would nip
my finger, get out of my water, his mouth would open like a little scoop of
blackness & let out one bubble, like a smoke ring of my father’s, a message
from the underworld.
Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly
Perhaps I should forgive
Telly for dying in my care, Just a
fish, someone said, Just
get another. Lucille said
our power becomes
greater when we lose the flesh; so,
when I poured Telly out
of his painted casket (a little wooden
egg) out over the rail
into the all
becoming, was it a miracle
that he had lived, was it a miracle?
Once, when I prayed for a sign,
God opened the closed
vault of the sky, the sun popped out
& shone directly in my face, & hail, yes,
hail started falling (in July). I was
afraid to believe in love. God,
don’t waste your miracles on me. &
the sun went back, like a face
retreating. Telly, you are bodi-
less, you are with my mother
& father. Say it wasn’t my
fault you suffered, with your little
working gills, say you forgive me.
On the reasons I loved Telly the fish
Why would I say I was
“pathetic,” when talking about my
life, why would I think of it as
“little”—my “little life,” I said,
as if, looking back
at what kept me alive,
what I constructed to make my own
success, to regard that with
tenderness &
understanding—as something even
sweet &
marvelous—was
insane? Then maybe I began to
love Telly—
really nothing in the
grand scheme of things—the way that lady, when I told her that
I paid 100 dollars a month for someone to come in &
feed Telly when I was away, said—”but, Toi, how much
did Telly cost? $1.98? Well then why not just
flush him every time & get another?”
Whatever I said
to myself, whatever
I felt & did, that
kind of care was
silly,
nice, but, well, you know,
crazy, the way, when you grow up &
understand the great
things, a fish’s life is
nothing, as if (& probably they can’t
think or feel) there are much more
important things to
do to think about to
love & dedicate ourselves
to: there are
doctors, great
poets, there is
fine furniture, true love, children,
god, for
god’s sake, there is everything to
remember, everything to be
worried & concerned about, as if I could
find it if I just kept
looking, something really
real out there always just outside of what I could
take in. & this was how I
stayed alive.
My aunt took me to
her job from the time I was about
three. I’d go down to the
basement where she was
head of the mail department—first black woman to have such an
executive job in Detroit, even though it was
in the basement—I’d take up a little
desk in the corner & do whatever she said, open
the flaps of envelopes by the box—five hundred in a box, maybe
twenty boxes a day for ten cents a box &, with each box, I’d
compete with myself, each day,
to make more
money, & make enough
to buy my own
lunch, a corned beef sandwich at the
Broadway Market with
two halves of a new
dill & a fruit
punch, & sit there at the
marble counter enjoying
the warmth of meat,
the slop of mustard,
& the way the
rind of the bread was
just a little tough to
tear with your teeth.
I worked without
word,
away from the grownups, able to
make my own
way & feel
competent, as if I had a
place & something I could truly
do without making somebody
mad or un-
happy. &, just looking
back on myself, as if I were an eye
looking from a high
place, seeing that little
girl, counting the envelopes, boxes, making her
fingers go faster,
counting the boxes over & over because she’d
forget & had to make certain,
enjoying how many boxes were piling
up, how, yesterday, she did a box in ten minutes &
today she could do more than
two boxes in twenty (there was always a way to
try harder & give the day a good
reason.)
When I looked back
on that little five-year-old, six, seven, eight, nine,
it was as if I were a little
busy fish being watched by an
interested & even caring
owner, as if I had finally
bought myself.
Because I was good to Telly in his life,
because I taught him Alice Neel
& fed him frozen mealworms,
(until I
found out he’d
lose his bright red tail color
for that pleasure),
because I never left him
alone when I traveled (never liking those
who said their betta did just fine
sitting on the edge of their office desk
over the long weekend—how would you
like it not to eat for three
days, I wanted to ask), for choosing
carefully among the pet
sitters, interviewing, looking for one who took a fish
seriously
& told betta stories about how smart they
are, coming up
to say hi in the morning, checking you
out with a certain calm or anxious
look in the eye, because
I believed
in one fish’s
brain & life & skills &
emptied him out into the
thawing river saying
prayers for my
lover or husband or brother
of a year,
because of this I am certain
he sent me a
gift from the china blue
rivers of heaven, a lovely man, who
first kissed me on
that bridge,
sending a photo
after rain of “Kissing
Bridge underwater” scrawled with his loose
sprawling letters; because all things are
connected, a
circle,
bread on the water, as my mother said,
always comes home.
An apology to Telly the revolutionary
Love or respect, my father said,
you can’t have both.
Last night, after the reading,
the audience
climbed to their feet
& cheered you—as if
you were a rock star!
Viva Telly!
Telly lives!
One woman explained,
you only let them think you were
a fish; but, right now,
you are in
Jamaica or Cuba with
Assata Shakur.
They giggled
at our kiss & I thought:
now they see the real
me, not a poet, just
some pathetic old woman
who made a lover
of a fish. So I reasoned. After all,
you weren’t real, you were only
a symbol.
Telly,
I never meant
to betray you. Just
to distract them
as I handed myself
a robe.
When the goddess makes love to me,
she has to pass through my father,
she has to find him
where he sits in a corner inside me
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