The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
Page 12
it has been enough
4.
a voice foretold
that i shall find
sanctuary
somewhere in alabama
a baby is born to a girl
in a tarpaper room
his blind hand shivers
groping toward her breasts
as toward a lamp
she holds him to her
and begins to sing
live where you can
be happy as you can
slowly
the soft eyes open
5.
all eyes fail
before time’s eye
it has been enough
slowly the soft eyes open
what ground is this
what god
i could say much to you
be happy as you can
defending my tongue
what i be talking about
can be said in this language
only this tongue
be the one that understands
what i be talking about
you are you talking about
the landscape that would break me
if it could the trees
my grandfolk swung from the dirt
they planted in and ate
no what i be talking about
the dirt the tree the land
scape can only be said
in this language the words
be hard be bumping out too much
to be contained in one thin tongue
like this language this landscape this life
catalpa flower
from the wisdom of sister brown
1.
on sisterhood
some of our sisters
who put down the bucket
lookin for us
to pick it up
2.
on lena (born 6/30/17)
people talk about beautiful
and look at lizabeth taylor
lena just stand there smilin
a tricky smile
3.
on the difference between
eddie murphy and richard pryor
eddie, he a young blood
he see somethin funny
in everythin ol rich
been around a long time
he know aint nothin
really funny
the birth of language
and adam rose
fearful in the garden
without words
for the grass
his fingers plucked
without a tongue
to name the taste
shimmering in his mouth
did they draw blood
the blades did it become
his early lunge
toward language
did his astonishment
surround him
did he shudder
did he whisper
eve
we are running
running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we’re running
toward
is what we want.
what the grass knew
after some days, toward evening,
He stood under a brackish sky
trembling and blaming creation.
but the grass knew that what is built
is finally built for others,
that firmament is not enough, that
tiger was coming and partridge and
whale and even their raucous voices
would not satisfy. He, walking
the cool of the garden, lonely
as light, realized that He must feed
His own hunger or die. adam,
He nodded, adam,
while the understanding grass
prepared itself for eve.
nude photograph
here is the woman’s
soft and vulnerable body,
every where on her turning
round into another
where. shadows on her
promising mysterious places
promising the answers to
questions impossible to ask.
who could rest one hand here or here
and not feel, whatever the shape
of the great hump longed for
in the night, a certain joy, a certain,
yes, satisfaction, yes.
this is for the mice that live
behind the baseboard,
she whispered, her fingers
thick with cheese. what i do
is call them, copying their own
voices; please please please
sweet please. i promise
them nothing. they come
bringing nothing and we sit
together, nuzzling each other’s
hungry hands. everything i want
i have to ask for, she sighed.
sleeping beauty
when she woke up
she was terrible.
under his mouth her mouth
turned red and warm
then almost crimson as the coals
smothered and forgotten
in the grate.
she has been gone so long.
there was so much to unlearn.
she opened her eyes.
he was the first thing she saw
and she blamed him.
a woman who loves
impossible men
sits a long time indoors
watching her windows
she has no brother
who understands
where she is not going
her sisters offer their
own breasts up, full and
creamy vessels but she
cannot drink because
she loves impossible men
a woman who loves
impossible men
listens at night to music
she cannot sing
she drinks good sherry
swallowing around the notes
rusted in her throat
but she does not fill
she is already full
of love for impossible men
a woman who loves
impossible men
promises each morning
that she will take this day in her
hands
disrobe it lie with it
learn to love it
but she doesn’t she walks by
strangers walks by kin
forgets their birthmarks
their birthdays
remembers only the names
the stains of impossible men
man and wife
she blames him, at the last, for
backing away from his bones
and his woman, from the life
he promised her was worth
cold sheets. she blames him
for being unable to see
the tears in her eyes, the birds
hovered by the window, for love being
not enough, for leaving.
he blames her, at the last, for
holding him back with her eyes
beyond when the pain was more
than he was prepared to bear,
for the tears he could neither
end nor ignore, for believing
that love could be enough,
for the birds, for the life
so difficult to leave.
poem in praise of menstruation
if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon if
there is a river
more faithful than this
>
returning each month
to the same delta if there
is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain if there is
a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel if there is in
the universe such a river if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave
peeping tom
sometimes at night he dreams back
thirty years
to the alley outside our room
where he stands, a tiptoed boy
watching the marvelous thing
a man turning into a woman.
sometimes
beating himself with his own fist
into that spilled boy and the
imagined world of that man
that woman that night, he lies
turned from his natural wife.
sometimes he searches the window for
a plaid cap, two wide eyes.
ways you are not like oedipus
for Michael Glaser
you have spared your father
you pass the sphinx without
answering you recognized
your mother in time
your sons covet only
their own kingdoms
you lead your daughters
even in your blindness
you do not wander far
from your own good house
it is home and you know it
the killing of the trees
the third went down
with a sound almost like flaking,
a soft swish as the left leaves
fluttered themselves and died.
three of them, four, then five
stiffening in the snow
as if this hill were Wounded Knee
as if the slim feathered branches
were bonnets of war
as if the pale man seated
high in the bulldozer nest
his blonde mustache ice-matted
was Pahuska come again but stronger now,
his long hair wild and unrelenting.
remember the photograph,
the old warrior, his stiffened arm
raised as if in blessing,
his frozen eyes open,
his bark skin brown and not so much
wrinkled as circled with age,
and the snow everywhere still falling,
covering his one good leg.
remember his name was Spotted Tail
or Hump or Red Cloud or Geronimo
or none of these or all of these.
he was a chief. he was a tree
falling the way a chief falls,
straight, eyes open, arms reaching
for his mother ground.
so i have come to live
among the men who kill the trees,
a subdivision, new,
in southern Maryland.
I have brought my witness eye with me
and my two wild hands,
the left one sister to the fists
pushing the bulldozer against the old oak,
the angry right, brown and hard and spotted
as bark. we come in peace,
but this morning
ponies circle what is left of life
and whales and continents and children and ozone
and trees huddle in a camp weeping
outside my window and i can see it all
with that one good eye.
pahuska=long hair, lakota name for custer
questions and answers
what must it be like
to stand so firm, so sure?
in the desert even the saguro
hold on as long as they can
twisting their arms in
protest or celebration.
you are like me,
understanding the surprise
of jesus, his rough feet
planted on the water
the water lapping
his toes and holding them.
you are like me, like him
perhaps, certain only that
the surest failure
is the unattempted walk.
november 21, 1988
25 years
those days
before the brain blew back
mottled and rusting against the pink coat
them days
when the word had meaning
as well as definition
those days
when honor was honorable and
good and right were good and right
them days
when the spirit of hope
reached toward us waving a wide hand
and smiling toward us yes
those days
them days
the days
before the bubble closed
over the top of the world no
this is not better than that
the beginning of the end of the world
cockroach population possibly declining
—news report
maybe the morning the roaches
walked into the kitchen
bold with they bad selves
marching up out of the drains
not like soldiers like priests
grim and patient in the sink
and when we ran the water
trying to drown them as if they were
soldiers they seemed to bow their
sad heads for us not at us
and march single file away
maybe then the morning we rose
from our beds as always
listening for the bang of the end
of the world maybe then
when we heard only the tiny tapping
and saw them dark and prayerful
in the kitchen maybe then
when we watched them turn from us
faithless at last
and walk in a long line away
the last day
we will find ourselves surrounded
by our kind all of them now
wearing the eyes they had
only imagined possible
and they will reproach us
with those eyes
in a language more actual
than speech
asking why we allowed this
to happen asking why
for the love of God
we did this to ourselves
and we will answer
in our feeble voices because
because because
eight-pointed star
wild blessings
licked in the palm of my hand
by an uninvited woman. so i have held
in that hand the hand of a man who
emptied into his daughter, the hand
of a girl who threw herself
from a tenement window, the trembling
junkie hand of a priest, of a boy who
shattered across viet nam
someone resembling his mother,
and more. and more.
do not ask me to thank the tongue
that circled my fingers
or pride myself on the attentions
of the holy lost.
i am grateful for many blessings
but the gift of understanding,
the wild one, maybe not.
somewhere
some woman
just like me
tests the lock on the window
in the children’s room,
lays out tomorrow’s school clothes,
sets the table for breakfast early,
finds a pen between the c
ushions
on the couch
sits down and writes the words
Good Times.
i think of her as i begin to teach
the lives of the poets,
about her space at the table
and my own inexplicable life.
1
when i stand around among poets
i am embarrassed mostly,
their long white heads,
the great bulge in their pants,
their certainties.
i don’t know how to do
what i do in the way
that i do it. it happens
despite me and i pretend
to deserve it.
but i don’t know how to do it.
only sometimes when
something is singing
i listen and so far
i hear.
2
when i stand around
among poets, sometimes
i hear a single music
in us, one note
dancing us through the
singular moving world.
water sign woman
the woman who feels everything
sits in her new house
waiting for someone to come
who knows how to carry water
without spilling, who knows
why the desert is sprinkled
with salt, why tomorrow
is such a long and ominous word.
they say to the feel things woman