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of a chorus
outside my window & I wonder
if it has brought back
a bunch of its friends
to serenade me to sleep.
2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away
They have a hard thing
on the top of their head that sticks out
like the bill of a baseball cap (but pointy),
so they can’t
look up; they
only see the ground & don’t know
you’re screaming & waving
your hands. They see only
your foot & they imagine
its cool shadow: what a good place
to hide, they say.
Note
If the slaves
could create gospel
music & praise
God, then, Toi,
no
more
grumbling!
Pantoum for the Broken
How many of us were fingered?
A soft thing with a hole in it,
a thing that won’t tell, that can’t.
I forget how many times I was broken,
a soft thing with a hole in it.
Some remember, grateful it wasn’t worse;
I forget how many times I was broken.
Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.
Some remember, grateful it wasn’t worse.
Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.
Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.
Sleepwalking, I go back to where it happens.
Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.
We don’t know when or why or who broke in.
Sleepwalking, we go back to where it happens.
Not wanting to go back, we make it happen.
If we escaped, will we escape again?
I leapt from my body like a burning thing.
Not wanting to go back, I make it happen
until I hold the broken one, hold her and sing.
The Peaches of August
The long-awaited, here, at the local farm stand, are not as comely as
the ones at Whole Foods, but they are dollars cheaper, and so we sweep
them up like sweepstakes winners, and stack them in our purposeful
cloth bags. Tomorrow, one of us, before the other awakens, will slice
into Tupperware the 4 or 5 softest to the fingers (to test, press kindly as
a newborn’s cheek), and stir them with brown sugar from a box atop
the refrigerator.
The permission
I don’t care. Write anything you want about me.
It’s not about me, anyway. Whatever you write, it’s about you.
BRUCE DERRICOTTE
There is a language that says
size doesn’t matter. It’s supposed to help
us who can’t do better. But we must
do better.
Something
changed & so
we tried harder.
We used unnatural devices
We made hay
• • •
Imagine a plastic
cup over a wavering
penis. How could hardness
not save us? How could we, then, not
make it, force it,
if need be?
We mustn’t cry mustn’t give up: the spectacle
of a man with an angel
strapped to his thigh
that keeps coming
loose
• • •
The wife still wants it.
Meat Meat Meat on a
spindle or a salty plate not tears
but the labia puffed &
sweet. I have no will to let go
of what I long for:
a last drive
• • •
Is poetry meant to handle
the inner sanctum, the blasted
bed? It would help
if it were somebody else’s
business
to confess, to lay bare an
embarrassment. Let him have a dead
man’s pride. But I am willing
to breathe life in to take
it in my hands
• • •
I always thought
we wouldn’t have to come to
what shouldn’t have to be tried because
we shouldn’t have come to this
• • •
We succumbed
to the evening news
tongue-tied old lovers
for whom there was one
sad language
& too much riding
on that piece
The proof
After thirty years, I was done
with talking. I had told him
I was leaving, but still we’d sit
at the dinner table—me to his right—& I’d watch him. He’d
put the forkfuls in his mouth & chew,
a calm look on his face. How I wanted him
to suffer, to see that there was some
register where it
mattered. If he would just turn
his eye, like a great
planet, slowly, as if over
epochs. I wouldn’t have left
if he had
looked at me with
sorrow or, perhaps, not even
sorrow, but turned toward me with sudden
awareness. Why were tears
pouring down my
cheeks? It wasn’t that he was angry,
that would have been
a kind of recognition. If anything confirmed
my going, it was that
absence—not even cool—as if there was nothing
between us that couldn’t be dissolved
by will; nothing that could be
altered by desire.
He would often tell me about a tree
in his childhood that was right in the middle of a
baseball field, a huge old tree
where the kids played ball, so that they had to
run around it to hit second base, how the coaches
wanted to take it down . . . but there was one old man who fought
for the tree &, though he didn’t win & the tree was cut, whenever
Bruce went home, years later, there was a perfect
field but nobody ever played
there. Is the mystery that no matter what I felt
was missing, there is something
that remains? But he went on, the meat
chewed, the water in the glass
swallowed. Perhaps what I had put on the table tasted
good, perhaps he was appreciating
my efforts, that I had called him, that, as usual, I had
made dinner for us. Perhaps he was concentrating
on something I couldn’t see—me, so determined
to affect him, to make him pay. Wasn’t there a right
& a wrong here? I remember the time I decided
to move to Pittsburgh
for the job, to stay married but to live
apart. We had gone out to
the Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater,
& we sat by the stream. He confessed
that something in him had been missing
all those years. He talked about his
childhood—the fears, of him being
the only black
boy in that town, & how his mother brought the news
of lynchings fifty miles away
in Indiana & taught him not to touch
the white girls
who flirted. He didn’t present it
to change anything, not for
sympathy but, as it happened, sometimes—if rarely
in our 30 years together—that
we showed ourselves without even a scintilla
of the will
to make things better. & that’s what made it so
terrible & blinding, so
true.
Rereading Jerry Stern
I realize that I no longer want to write perfectly constructed and “deeply
meaningful” poems. I see what a great gift it is if a writer just truthfully
records the way her mind moves: seizing on one thing, one connection,
and running with it like a cat might run behind an unwinding ball,
wherever it goes—down the back stairs (which, today, for some reason,
seem to be dusted with years of unswept flour!), unrolling down a hall
and into a back bedroom (though why was that particular door ajar?).
Sex in old age
Are we a-
sexual now, touching
each other tenderly, more
tenderly than a mother,
the dear, dear
body in our hands? You touch me
as if each cell of you remembers
where I live. I live
here and here, everywhere
you touch moves, as if a breath
is passing over baby hairs.
Your hand passing
down my back, cupping
my buttocks, I can’t remember
in between,
my body is lost in your
making, my mind
asking, what is this quick
parting of dead cells, this
brushing away
of small planets?
You are too naked
to take in, like the whole
David, O
nipple of light
on my tongue.
Streaming
What do you do
with the time in which
you no longer worry,
no longer undoing
every little victory
as if it were a knot?
I laze about streaming
a hundred and nine episodes
of “Brothers and Sisters” waiting
for the seventy-year-old uncle
to admit he’s gay, and the mother,
The Flying Nun, as old as I
am and grounded, to stop
looking for love in
all the wrong places and grab
a poem out of the air—
the way Ruth Stone said she took
no credit, just
thought of the universe
and stuck her hand up in it
like a baseball mitt.
Summer evening at Still Point
the centre cannot hold . . .
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
“The Second Coming”
In the middle of fixing dinner,
like ducklings follow the mother duck,
we follow Sister Sylvia to the spring-fed pond.
At first, reluctant; and then, exultant,
until every one of us belly flops in
in our clothes. The water’s delightful, a little cooler
than the summer air, and so clear green, you can
keep your eyes open without stinging.
The “gift” ducks (Sylvia’s recent hustle
from the local farm), fuss and scatter
as she ploughs the center and turns
face up to heaven. Though her rice is burning!
And it’s twenty minutes past the dinner bell.
Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly
Love is memory lit.
I wish I had
taken his picture but,
in those days, some part of my heart was still
unswimmingly
cold &, as much as I loved
Telly, I couldn’t imagine
carrying a fish’s
picture in my wallet, or
putting one (in a gold frame)
on the same mahogany
shelf with my grandson. All I have today
is
the Telly in my heart, a shimmery
thinking
in red veils. I remember
his swishy tail, a magisterial emblem
of the Living God. In heaven we will swim together
through clouds & spheres of wonder
far beyond
this unpardoning
glass of water.
Watching a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God
When I watch it push out
the purse (half
the size of its own body) that contains
a hundred jelly-
like nymphs, a labor that takes a molasses-
slow twenty-four hours—I wonder
is it—she!—
like us—pushing
with all she’s got? Or is hers a
painless birth, like we like to think
of the Virgin Mary’s, without
a smear
of shit or blood? Why does God
make every damn
female
have to work
so hard & suffer? Lucille, even after
breast cancer, even after her
kidneys failed & the twice weekly
dialysis, didn’t get really
mad at God until her youngest
girl, Fredericka,
died of a brain tumor
at 35. Then she didn’t speak
to God
for years. Not until her granddaughter
Bailey was born
did she give thanks
again, saying
that part of her lost
daughter had returned. How she loved
& praised it all. Toward the end,
she told me she wasn’t
angry at God anymore, but that,
when she got to heaven,
she had some
very tough questions
for him. Once Lucille visited
a grade school in Maryland
where, walking through the library, she noticed
a distinct
lack of color
on the shelves. Where are the books
with black
children in them, she asked. The assured
librarian had a swift
reply: “We don’t have any
black children in this school, so we don’t need
those books,” she said. “Well, you don’t
have any
bunnies in this school either, but you seem to have
plenty of books
about bunnies.”
Poor God, I thought, who,
having made
her shining brain—our brilliant Morning
Star—must have seen
Her coming.
“What are you?”
My DNA tells the same story as my face—
The mix that makes me at home in Greek,
Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese restaurants.
My skin duskier to sensors trained—
The sniffing nose, the prickly skin,
Ears alert for loud laughter, for the coloreds’ speech that,
Now, almost seventy years after desegregation, so often
Tricks, so that, when the actual person arrives
Who called about that house for sale, the agent stutters:
That property has just been sold. My answer changes.
For years, to avoid conversations that would take
A lifetime, minds purposely dulled for generations
(“Single consciousness,” Dubois might have called it),
I would say when introduced—to avoid later embarrassment
For us both—I’m Toi Derricotte, I’m black, and stick my hand out.
Now—is it pride in our complexity, and having written proof
From Ancestry.com that makes me sputter on about how
My ancestors (perhaps theirs too?) freighted cargo
Around the Mediterranean to places no
t yet named and bordered—
Genetic free-for-alls? Humans and Neanderthals had sex and produced
Viable offspring—but most evidence places these encounters in the Middle East,
Just after early humans exited Africa some 50,000–60,000 years ago.
Recently, caught in conversation at a cocktail party, I quoted
Percentages to curious whites: 72 percent European, 28 African
(A blend which, in New Orleans, in the 17th and 18th centuries,
Wouldn’t have bought a ticket to the Quadroon Ball!). Their faces
Waited for the punch line, until the black woman I was with cracked
The silence: You’ve been black all your life, she answered everyone.
To our various shades, another friend made it perfectly
Clear fifty years ago: If you black you black.
• • •
What changed when white people first saw (were amazed—
As they are now—the first time) a black person? In European
Towns in World War II, they wanted to touch the skin, the hair—
Black soldiers became accustomed to it on the streets where children
Wanted to put their hand in it, press it, smiling
In disbelief, gawking at features,
Putting their arms and hands against
The color to check, entranced, as if they’d discovered another planet.
Think of Keats and Chapman’s Homer:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
I wonder if Richard Wilbur was awakened
By the browns and blacks of our skin before he could awaken
To “the beautiful” in his famous poem:
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. For surely,
Any blackness is deeper than anyone knows. Or Tiffany’s
Idea, in 1885, to make glass’s colors more vibrant, “Their rich tones
Are due in part to the use of pot metal full of impurities.” Slavery
A generation gone, and my great-grandmother, Philomene,
Still a Louisiana washwoman with her fifty daily pounds
Of white women’s dirty laundry on her head.
• • •