Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  Her beautiful eyes looked amused but also sad. I noticed that, close up, her brow was creased, and she had delicately etched worry lines around her mouth. She wore a bright paisley bandana wrapped around her quiet Afro, and the yellow-brown-blue of the fabric somehow dramatized her gaze.

  “You’re right. To teach poetry you have to have lived—but lived in particular through words. Words are the key. I know this: words make meaning of our lives. Does that make any sense?”

  “I think words are shit. There’s a smoke screen of lying words everywhere. ‘Incursion’ for invasion. ‘Terminate with prejudice’ for kill. The pigs got it wrapped up. I’ve watched the love of my heart bleed to death.”

  “The love of my heart,” I said. “That’s the resistance against ‘incursion’ and ‘terminate with prejudice’ and ‘building a bridge to tomorrow’ and ‘Would I lie to you?’ and ‘in the unlikely event of a change in cabin pressure.’”

  “The love of my heart is dead. Period. The love of my heart ain’t goin’ to come back and terminate with prejudice any fascist oppressor. The love of my heart took a bullet in his chest on the New Jersey Turnpike. And contrary to what the cops put out, he had his hands up, he had his back up against the car: he was set up and he was shot without mercy.”

  All of this was delivered sotto voce. I heard Baby Ain’t’s bright voice across the room, laughing at her joke: “Turnpike: you pay to get on, you pay to get off.” Never raised her voice a little, exasperated with Gene again: “Besseme colo!” And a whisper: “Jesus, Jesus.” I was aware of Polly Lyle silently watching us. And Sallie, Sallie watching too.

  I smiled at them both, then turned back to Akilah, who was still talking.

  “I wrote a poem—I’ve been writing them all along here. But how is writing poems supposed to help me? I gave birth to my daughter shackled to the bed, in leg irons. They let me keep her a few days, then pigs, men in uniforms, came into the room and tore her away from me. I was nursing her when they came in. They chained my arms. She screamed for me as they pulled her away from my breast. I heard her screaming down the hall as they took her away. My milk would not stop. You think that would ever happen to you? You think you would ever write about it?”

  “Have you? Written about it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was not sure I should ask to read the poem. So I said nothing.

  “I noticed,” she said, “that you stopped bringing along your little stash of contraband, the newspapers and notebooks. I was watching for a while there thinking that you were pretty right on for contributing those things. And what did it take for you to stop? One slap on the hand by the warden? Isn’t that what happened?”

  “Right,” I said. “One slap.”

  “One slap,” she said, her mouth turning down bitterly. “That’s all it took—to change the way you look at your incarcerated sisters.”

  “No,” I said. “It changed how I looked at myself in prison. I was doing more damage than good—I learned something.”

  “The Department of Corrections is not exactly the one you need to learn from.”

  “So I should learn from you?”

  “I’m a smart girl, like you. I went to college. Got down with Huey and the Panthers and the Weathermen. I converted Muslim and I fell in love. I wrote some poems. But here’s the difference between us. If white people join together as a political force, it’s a good thing. If black people advocate for themselves, it’s a cause for fear and the violence of the state—a threat. And you believe in justice.”

  “I believe in justice. I just can’t say what it is.”

  “It’s not this: me in a shot-up car on the turnpike, my man dead on the ground, facedown by the bumper, his blood on the street—lights in my eyes and evidence being planted on me. I could shoot a gun—Youngblood taught me—but I looked at him on the ground and I chose not to squeeze that trigger. What kind of fair trial you think I get?”

  I started to answer, something glib about the jury system—but she cut me off. Her eyes were dark with fury.

  “No. You tell me, what kind of fair trial, what kind of justice you think I’d be handed?”

  I knew the answer.

  “There’s no justice for me, you see, girl. You heard the expression: people got to make their own justice.”

  We sat there, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “And poetry can try, but it can’t make this world fair—now, can it?”

  I didn’t answer. I had no answers for her—not even my mother’s voice reciting Shelley: “Wail, for the world’s wrong.” Or Kyrilikov’s devastating view of the kind of poetry that political ideologies end up writing.

  “What is it that you want me to say?” I asked. “What is it you want me to do? You’ve already made up your mind about everything in advance.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m still waiting for you to teach me something real about poetry. Give me please just one line of a poem about the fight to stay human in prison.”

  I didn’t quote Ho Chi Minh’s poem, or Hart Crane’s—but I told her about W. H. Auden, who, I’d discovered to my amazement, had written a poem in which the old Women’s House of Detention in the Village showed up. It was called “First Things First.” In talking about the poem in an interview, Auden said that a friend of his, the Catholic activist Dorothy Day, had been locked up there after having been arrested for participating in a protest march. She told Auden about how all the inmates were herded in line together to take showers each day and one of the women (“a whore,” he’d said) was heard quoting lines from a poem of Auden’s that had been published in The New Yorker that week. The lines were: “Hundreds have lived without love,/but none without water.” I recited the lines and Akilah stared back at me. “It makes both of our points,” I said. “Not words—water. My point is made by the fact that an inmate is reading poems and quoting from them—quoting Auden. And yours is made by what is actually being said by Auden in the poem—that we must have the basic elements to survive, not just words.”

  It wasn’t till I thought later about this conversation that I realized that I’d substituted “words” for Auden’s word, “love,” and that Akilah Malik had been asking me to imagine a different use of words, a different kind of love. But the making of language is love, I thought. Later I wished that I’d simply said it: that every poem written in our workshop had been an attempt to stay human.

  Just a day later, I ran into Akilah in the main hallway. She was standing close to the wall, a crumpled pass in her hand. She was so quiet, half in shadow, that I almost passed her by. I’d heard that she was about to be extradited to a prison in New Jersey—the trial concerning the state trooper’s death was about to begin. I’d also heard that she was going soon and going secretly. The Department of Corrections was worried that her friends on the outside, the Black Freedom Front, might try to liberate their leader.

  She’d be gone in a heartbeat, and I wanted to talk to her again. I was still intrigued by the fact that she said she’d been writing poems all along and not handing them in to the workshop.

  But Akilah looked nervous, and when I asked her how she was, she replied evasively, her eyes searching the corridor as if she was expecting someone. She looked at me as if she wanted me to go away. Just as I turned away from her, Polly Lyle appeared, half running, waving a pass.

  Akilah looked at her, then indicated me with a turn of her head.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

  Polly laughed.

  “This is our time, this is the only time we can get and the only place to do this.”

  I realized that the pass Polly had been waving was in fact a piece of folded paper, which she now opened and held before us. Akilah reached for it, but Polly held it away.

  “Teacher here is someone we can trust,” she said. “She not about to sell you up the river.”

  I glanced at the paper.

  “This is a poem of navigation,” said
Polly. “A poem with a use, you could say.

  “It’s all right,” Polly reassured Akilah. “Miss Mattox ain’t going to stop this from happening. I know that for true.”

  “On the other hand, I’d sure like to know what’s going on here,” I said.

  Akilah looked away, frightened, nervous. I’d never seen her like this.

  “Like I said,” Polly explained, her strange gold glittery eyes alight, her manner animated, “I’m handin’ Akilah Malik a poem.”

  Polly kept her eyes on mine, slowly opening the paper in her hand, and I saw what appeared to be handwritten lines of a poem. I glimpsed phrases like “south-facing” and “starboard turn.” Below the poem there was a sketch—a map? (North Brother Island?)—with what looked like lines of latitude and longitude and skulls and crossbones where perhaps there were rocks or the currents were most powerful. I thought I saw a path charted with arrows from Rikers to North Brother, with more arrows pointing to an open area at one end of the island: a bird in flight had been drawn in, descending hawklike over that strip of land.

  When C.O. Janson came up to the three of us, she looked distracted, shouting at others in the hall over her shoulder. The poem-map had disappeared into Akilah’s sleeve. Janson first asked for passes, which Polly and Akilah produced. She glanced at the passes, then turned to me.

  “I need to ask you, Ms. Mattox, why you are all gathered here in the corridor. You know, now, that civilians are not supposed to fraternize with inmates anywhere in the institution, including in the halls. I need to know why you all here right now.”

  There was a long pause. Both Polly and Akilah stared at me. Then Polly smiled her unforgettable smile.

  “Right,” I said. “We were discussing poetry, going over a poem for class. An upcoming assignment.”

  C.O. Janson nodded once, twice—then touched my shoulder. She was a shortish woman with brilliantined hair and a sweet rabbity overbite.

  “I understand,” she said. “But you can’t stand here in the hall and talk about poetry this or poetry that all day. You need to do that in the classroom, you follow?”

  “I do,” I said. “We all follow. Thank you for reminding me.”

  “Ladies!” Janson called out, turning away suddenly as a trio of inmates hurried past us. “Stop right there! Where are your passes, ladies?”

  I nodded to Polly and Akilah.

  “Good luck with the poem,” I said. “Exceptional imagery.”

  They both murmured something as I moved away. I think it was “Thank you,” but I’ve never been sure that’s what I heard. Polly saluted, a sailor’s salute—and Akilah turned to look at me with her steady assessing stare, a look I’ll never forget.

  “It’s my fault,” I said, “all my fault.”

  I began to cry. “I love you, but sometimes I think that I don’t want to be married. Maybe I just want to write. Maybe I’m a woman who needs to be alone. There are things bothering me, things on my mind. But I love you, Kenny. You know that.”

  I took a breath. “Look,” I said. “I haven’t been honest with you.”

  K.B. lifted his head from his hands. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking Red Zinger tea and smoking a joint I had rolled, badly. It was two A.M.

  “It’s that Sam Glass, isn’t it?”

  He took a hit of the joint and held it in, then slowly exhaled.

  I stopped crying and waved away smoke.

  “No, it’s not about him. Entirely. Just partially. I admit that I see him occasionally, but these questions about marriage I have are completely separate from him.”

  “You see him all the time.”

  “I see him because I work at Samizdat and because we go to the same literary parties. Could we not talk about Sam Glass?”

  “We never talk,” he said. He took another hit and handed the joint to me.

  “We do talk,” I said.

  “Then we never talk about what really matters.”

  “What really matters?” I put my mouth around the joint and drew out its blue acrid plant smoke as tears wobbled down my face. He didn’t answer.

  “I just need some time,” I said. “Some time away.”

  “I think I know you,” he said. “And then you change before my eyes. I thought this was a marriage. I thought this was forever.”

  “Forever,” I repeated, and laughed bitterly, then began to cry again. “Forever. I cannot get my mind around that word.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve come to understand that. But it doesn’t mean I can accept it.”

  We sat there weeping and smoking the joint in its rusty roach clip for a long time. We went to bed just as the sky grew light.

  Her memories had become my memories. And her wildness my wildness. It was true, I did not want to settle down. I did not want a husband, a family. I feared pregnancy. She had been trapped—her scholarship turned to dust, her hopes for college swept away with the rolling thunder and the cracked blowing soil. The chance to be a writer—the chance to be a poet—all she had ever wanted: swirling away in the wind. She had married, had children, but there was always something about her that seemed caged and eager to break free. Why had I given up my own independence so readily? Love, yes. But love—love was a prison too. I knew if I walked away from K.B., it would be because I feared that prison.

  I tried to write again. But the poems she always quoted circled the air around me.

  I’ll tell you how the sun rose,—

  A ribbon at a time.

  I’ll tell you how the sun rose. Over Manhattan, over the West Village and the East River and over Rikers Island. Just as Dickinson said: a ribbon at a time. I was watching from the roof. I’d climbed up the fire escape, fearless, clumsy, teetering, still high, not caring if I fell. I stood on the tarred cracked surface, the bitter aftertaste of grass in my mouth. I stood among the ghostly vents and chimney pipes and looked out over the City. The streaked sky, the East, blood-colored and beautiful: streamers of red and then the stacked tinderbox blowing up in slow motion over the skyscrapers into the burning succession of lit hours. As Pound said about literature: News that stays news. A ribbon at a time.

  and what we call belief thundered down in

  every synonym. Two mirrored cities:

  their symmetry invented as my own present,

  twinned to a past

  Twinned to a past, I thought ruefully, that’s what I’m crippled by, my past. But then I realized it: I’d made the present I lived in.

  I put my pen away, I let the tears come.

  Gene/Jean’s Haiku

  Cherry blossoms fall.

  I got a big dick. Plus tits.

  What you lookin’ at?

  —GENE/JEAN KEELEY, POET

  eleven

  The day after my conversation with K.B., I slept with Sam Glass. My indiscretion was connected to K.B. only in the sense that our conversation had seemed to signal the end of something between us. I’d left our apartment and was staying temporarily with Benny Mathison, and I was desperately sad.

  Sam Glass asked me to go out to dinner. At the restaurant, I drank some wine, and then I drank some brandy, but I was cold sober when I got into his bed. And I remained sober, even though I felt, that night, very briefly, as if I had a body, perhaps a beautiful body, loved by an ambitious lover. There was a candle by the bed glowing with a kind of devotional light, I remember that. And Sam Glass reaching across my naked body to pick up a glass of wine on the bedside table after we made love. I remember the shadows from the candlelight leaping on the walls and how he quoted a Salinger story in which a character says that his girlfriend’s body is so lovely that when he touches it, he feels that he should “balance” things by putting his other hand in fire. Something like that.

  “I should put my hand in fire,” he said, and I smiled, flattered, though I knew that for me, there was no balance, no dipping of the hand into the fire of suffering to equal ecstasy. Still, I knew that I was fortunate in some way to feel sexual desire, to be afforded ho
pe. To be alive in a different way. I had broken through to that. I thought of Polly’s fiery being, like Blake’s. I thought she’d broken through ecstasy to a state that I would never understand—perhaps where the body burns up in the conflagration of the mind’s sight. Then I looked down at my own body, and Sam Glass’s, and thought: I’m free now, I’m fucking free.

  So I was a liar, an adulteress, an outlaw, a whore. No rest for the wicked, buddy, but I’d rather be wicked than holier-than-thou. Heaven for climate, hell for company. Of course it was an excuse, but it was mine, and I’d go to trial, I’d be burned up in Salem on it. A human bonfire. So judge me. At least that’s what I told myself. So judge me. As I judged myself.

  In this defiant, miserable mood I went off to teach my Columbia workshop. I felt hollow and bleak, and a certain go-to-hell recklessness entered my lecture.

  “Wallace Stevens thinks like a French symbolist,” I said. “But of course you all know that.”

  My ten graduate students nodded. Someone to my left at the large round seminar table made a muted snoring noise.

  “It may seem obvious,” I said, and held my head. I had a slight hangover. “But when you read the entire work, it’s eerie to note how he is quintessentially American, yet he thinks in a poem like a reconstituted Laforgue. And here, in maybe his most beautiful poem—‘The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’—he seems to compare God with the imagination.”

  What a poem it was—and I wanted them to love it as I did.

  “I want you to love this poem!” I shouted, and they all sat up straighter for a second, shocked. I read aloud:

  Light the first light of evening, as in a room

  In which we rest and, for small reason, think

  The world imagined is the ultimate good.

  “‘For small reason,’” I said. “Obviously there isn’t much upon which to base our images of the ideal. But—he also means that it is the small thing, the particular image, that embodies and grounds enormity or Big Thinking. Like Blake’s particulars.”