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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the journals in which poems in this book originally appeared: The Crab Orchard Review; The Forward; The Gay and Lesbian Review; The Kenyon Review; The London Magazine; The Massachusetts Review; Metre; The New England Review; New Letters; The Paris Review; Parnassus; Pequod; Ploughshares; PN Review; Poetry International; Poetry London; Prairie Schooner; The Princeton Library Chronicle; The Progressive; Ratapallax; The Seattle Review; TriQuarterly; Upstairs at Duroc; Van Gogh’s Ear; The Womens Review of Books; The Yale Review.
“Grief” and “Respite in a Minor Key” first appeared in The Nation
“Desesperanto,” “Essay on Departure” and “Sonnet on a Line by Venus Khoury-Ghata” first appeared in Poetry
“Explication de texte” received the Smart Family Foundation Award from The Yale Review in 2001
DESESPERANTO
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Elegy for a Soldier
June Jordan, 1936-2002
I.
The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in a Second Avenue
diner. The lover was a Quaker,
a poet, an anti-war
activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four.
Wet snow fell on the access
road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was
neither lover, slept uptown.
But the arteries, streetlights, headlines,
phonelines, feminine plural
links ran silver through the night city
as dawn and the yellow cab
passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for
that days last or first coffee.
The city where I knew you was rich in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc debates, demos, parades and picnics.
There were walks I liked to take.
I was on good terms with two rivers.
You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words lighting the page, good neighbor on your homely street in Park Slope, whose Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers, dyke vegetarians, young
gifted everyone, claimed some changes —at least a new food co-op.
In the laundromat, ordinary women talked revolution.
We knew we wouldn’t live forever but it seemed as if we could.
The city where I knew you was yours and mine by birthright: Harlem, the Bronx. Separately we left it and came separately back.
There’s no afterlife for dialogue,
divergences we never
teased apart to weave back together.
Death slams down in the midst of all your unfinished conversations.
Whom do I address when I address you, larger than life as you always were, not alive now?
Words are not you, poems are not you, ashes on the Pacific tide, you least of all. I talk to myself to keep the line open.
The city where I knew you is gone.
Pink icing roses spelled out
PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake.
The bookshop’s a sushi bar
now, and PASSION is long out of print.
Would you know the changed street that
cab swerved down toward you through cold white mist?
We have a Republican
mayor. Threats keep citizens in line:
anthrax; suicide attacks.
A scar festers where towers once were; dissent festers unexpressed.
You are dead of a woman’s disease.
Who gets to choose what battle
takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends
mourn you, with no time to mourn.
II.
You, who stood alone in the tall bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning with free-flying words, knew the power, terror in words, in flying;
knew the high of solitude while the early light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint pen, yellow foolscap.
You, who stood alone in your courage, never hesitant to underline the connections (between rape, exclusion and occupation ...) and separations
were alone and were not alone when morning blotted the last spark of you out, around you voices you no longer had voice to answer, eyes you were blind to.
All your loves were singular: you scorned labels. Claimed black; woman , and for the rest eluded limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out self-definition.
Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers.
Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems alive on paper,
in the present tense of a thousand students’ active gaze at printed pages and blank ones which you gave permission to blacken into outrage and passion.
You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra,
Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric, were a black American, born in Harlem, citizen soldier
If you had to die—and I don’t admit it— who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man / we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you a few prime villains
in the capitol, who are also mortal?
June, you should be living, the states are bleeding. Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned dissident discourse.
Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes still in progress now, as Jenin, Ramallah dominate, then disappear from the headlines.
Palestine: your war.
“To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi. “Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.”
Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we infer, despairing.
To each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs, Palestinians, immigrants, its women.
From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish, Kavanagh, Shahid
(who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir, cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”), Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor, and you, June Jordan.
VENDANGES
Crepuscule with Muriel
Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk-
silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six
o’clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block,
cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk,
cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack
of butter, blueberry jam that’s almost black,
instead of tannin seeping into the cracks
of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects
the slit of a cut I haven’t the wit to fix
with a surgeon’s needle threaded with fine-gauge silk
as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.
But no key threads the cylinder of the lock.
Late afternoon light, transitory, licks
the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks
itself out beneath the wheel’s revolving spoke.
Taut thought’s gone, with a blink of attention, slack, a vision of “death and distance in the mix”
(she lost her words and how did she get them back when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck?
The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics
she translated to a syntax which connects
intense and unfashionable politics
with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex;
then the short-circuit of the final stroke,
the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke).
What a gaze out the window interjects:
on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks,
tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk
by a plump brown
girl in a purple anorak.
The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks
out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks
whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks
rouged by the fluvial light of six o’clock.
^4
Days of 1999
One unexceptional bright afternoon in August, coming from the rose garden secreted behind the rue Villehardouin,
I thought, fleet, furtive, if I lived alone I could stay here
and pushed the thought away as firmly and unlikely as Might rain later because I wanted just to choose and I had chosen, more than cobblestones and arbors, more than the benediction of new loaves’ scent blown from the bakery, the benediction of the late white rose, more than the blank page of the cloudless sky, to honor choice, reflecting on it daily but even as the thought diminished on a wave of warm bread and the holiday banter of children with no homework to do a choice I never made was made for me in another mind, another country I thought I had some claim to, which I knew not at all, as that warm wave let me drift with no anticipating harbor left.
Spring showers wash the hidden rose garden; an evenings bread is rising in an oven: the afternoons word resonates alone as a sky, mother-and-fatherless in its gray and quotidian distress blurts the repeated questions of the rain.
Embittered Elegy
i.m. Matthew Shepard and Dr. Barnett Slepian
Sheltered by womanhood and middle age
from their opinionated ignorance
since I’m their teacher, since they’re my students,
I try to wedge bars of their local cage
open.... But what they’re freed to voice is rage
against every adjacent difference.
The week the boy froze on the barbed-wire fence a strapping senior roasted “men in drag”: bad attitude, grotesque, arrogant, ugly.
And if some skinny gay kid, black like him (as Matthew and his torturers all were white) made an inopportune advance one night, what would be his righteous masculine response? Flagellate and crucify?
Who’s keen to flagellate and crucify?
The sleek umber young man was more complex than his predictable gender-and-sex prejudices. What idea or fantasy was fleshed for him in Thom Gunn’s elegies?
And the tall blonde girl, her long neck’s chignon a dancer’s, in what context was it revealed to her that feminazi was the word for other young women who railed against a certain status quo— jealous, of course, deserving to be beaten?
Did she think I might imagine my own arm-bone
splinter as grinning frat boys knocked me down
while I read (with a teacher’s distance) what she’d written?
While I read (with a teacher’s distance) what she’d written —her sturmbannfuhrerin : a lesbian Jew—
I wondered what violence she’d been witness to or suffered, that she had, or had not, forgotten, but could not name, that prompted her to threaten anyone who’d try to tell her, “you don’t have to take that shit.” But I withdrew; something heavier than indifference set in and neither her fresh grace nor her obvious pain provided me with the right questions.
In my windowless and anonymous
office painted institutional green, her
awkward plea hid in a trial sestina
behind a slur devised by “right-wing Christians.”
Behind a slur devised by “right-wing Christians” the battered boy hangs naked on barbed wire; a picture window shatters in sniper fire: the obstetrician who performed abortions bleeds into Sabbath bread.
(That week’s distortions which Pizza Hut evangelists inspired featured angelic embryos, martyred by selfish women with degenerate notions.)
In a bare-walled projection-booth-sized room, the students pass the week’s assignment out.
A pile grows on my desk, page upon page, in which, against the odds, may be a poem, instead of calumnies from which I’m not sheltered by womanhood and middle age.
English 182
Of fourteen students in “American Women Poets of the 20th Century,”
(mostly Italian daughters of White Flight)
only one had ever taken
another course where she’d read poetry.
Meter, Modernism, metaphor:
words from some short-wave broadcast, late at night... Millay was “much too intellectual,”
Neither “Sappho” nor “Sacco” raised a brow.
We were a little vague on World War II.
We hadn’t ever heard of Emmett Till.
I wanted recognition, someone’s eyes widening, a smile, complicity....
Two late afternoons a week: the fall fell, the basement window narrowed light.
I fixed on the one black student: might she surprise
both of us with some discovery,
not stare back blankly when I called on her
and say “I haven’t done the reading”? She
was large and shy; framed her thoughts awkwardly,
but scrupulous B’s were what she earned
on homework, until term’s end, when she turned
in a mostly plagiarized term paper
on Plath (whose critics more unerringly
tempt plagiarists than her biographers
tempt suicide). When she saw her grade: a C
(out of wrong-headed generosity),
she stumbled from the classroom, stayed away
for twenty minutes, came back, took her seat
red-eyed, and sat there ostentatiously
not opening the text-anthology where I’d assigned three poems by Audre Lorde. Of course I called on her. Firmly, she said “My book’s not open.”—as if she were bored.
At six, when I dismissed the class, she stayed behind, and burst in tears—about her grade. She was a graduating senior, and an English major; she had worked so hard on that paper, and she wasn’t used to getting low grades. (Everything she’d done earlier, ungrammatical, handwritten and tentatively spelled had been her own.) Three others of her classmates had produced plagiarized papers—she wasn’t unique.
But there she’d sat, glaring dully at me while I discussed black women’s poetry refusing to make eye contact or speak as if her silence were an accident, as if I didn’t know what failure meant.
Days of 1967
Leaf-mulch, wood-smoke odor of Lapsang Souchong: afternoons with Bill, unemployed, the Fillmore full of run-down flats you could rent for nothing. Unfinished paintings
covered peeling wallpaper, crumbling plaster.
He mapped out interior decoration:
It would be a gallery, our salon rival Mme de Stael’s.
Sutter Street was close enough to Perine Place for impromptu visits (no phone) and we were arrogant and innocent (we were twenty-three; twenty-seven).
Every time a hangover killed more brain cells Ed come by when it was decently teatime; he’d put on the kettle and we’d indulge in the Higher Gossip.
Yes, who slept with whom—but the evolution of their consciousness, intuition, taste in china ? (Please, Bill!) interested us more than heartbreak and cruising.
He was from Virginia: Spode was a factor.
I came from chipped earthenware in the Bronx, but we were kindred outcasts (Genet); Stendhal and Proust realigned us.
Hippies in the Haight, faggots in Japantown— ignorant colonialists: the ’60s— lesbians (before the Mission) in Oakland.
I hadn’t met them.
Oh, I knew, but couldn’t know, docks, parks, “tearooms,” parallel to crushes, marriages, passions, where my sister-spirits, my sometime-lovers lived out their dream-lives.
My life, in comparison, was one-sided.
Soon I met the lesbians out in Oakland.
(Bill—“La donn’ e’ mobile”—hummed the Verdi aria, tone-deaf.)
Decades: you ask, AIDS? Bill, one year, went bankrupt buying twelve-place services, Spode and Wedgwood, in a three-roomed flat, no room for them, half his friends dead or dyi
ng.
It takes less than death to inter a friendship though it feels like death: the unfinished paintings stacked in mini-storage, the china sold and our correspondence
buried in a library file. “La donn’ e’ mobile.” I brew Lapsang Souchong, fragrant as a smoky memory, while a kitchen resonates music.
A Farewell to the Finland Woman
i.m. KarigSara 1917-1999
sad is Eros, builder of cities and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
—W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”
Two thousand orphans, real ones and children of Jewish deported parents, so you and your ill-sorted Red Cross wartime colleagues made it your business to feed and save them.
Blackout: You hacked up dray horses killed in the air raids, and brought the meat to the orphanage: black market lamb a butcher comrade donated, you told suspicious children.
Interned in ’53 as a Trotskyist you underwent a double mastectomy for “lumpy breasts”: chloroform was the one anesthetic used in the gulag.
Pain wasn’t something you ever dwelled upon.
Most probably, your breasts weren’t cancerous— Tubercular and convalescent you were excused from the mines and road work.
So you were put to work in the bindery.
You’d bound a Russian engineer’s personal notebook in a silk scarf you’d hidden: proving your competence (proof you loved her)
and every evening, you warned the prisoners who was in danger: punishment, overwork.
You’d sworn, of course, you read no Russian —just a Hungarian female convict.
When I knew you, you liked your flat chest: you had two inside pockets sewn in each suit jacket.
You and the engineer exchanged long letters: your model for prose was Chekhov.
Your six-room Buda-side-of-the-Danube flat reminded me of rooms in the Bronx which were East Europe reinvented, purplish overstuffed furniture, steamy laundry
hung in the bathroom on a contraption with pulleys. You drank me under the table each night; I could hear you, every morning back at the typewriter at six-thirty.
What were you writing, decades of mornings when you were a senior editor, polyglot translator, advocate for writers, war hero, fabulist, solitary—
Desesperanto Page 1