I

by Toi Derricotte

while they could

  they held him down and

  chopped him, held him up

  my little fish, my blueness

  swallowed in the air

  turned pink

  and wailed.

  no more. enough.

  i lay back, speechless, looking

  for something.

  to say to myself.

  after you have

  touched the brain,

  that squirmy

  lust of maggots,

  after you have

  pumped the heart,

  that thief,

  that comic, you

  throw her in the trash.

  and the little one

  in a case

  of glass . . .

  he is not i

  i am not him

  he is not i

  . . . the stranger.

  blue

  air

  protects us from each other.

  here.

  here is the note he brings.

  it says, mother.

  but i do not even know

  this man.

  in knowledge of young boys

  i knew you before you had a mother,

  when you were newtlike, swimming,

  a horrible brain in water.

  i knew you when your connections

  belonged only to yourself,

  when you had no history

  to hook on to,

  barnacle,

  when you had no sustenance of metal

  when you had no boat to travel

  when you stayed in the same

  place, treading the question;

  i knew you when you were all

  eyes and a cocktail,

  blank as the sky of a mind,

  a root, neither ground nor placental;

  not yet

  red with the cut nor astonished

  by pain, one terrible eye

  open in the center of your head

  to night, turning, and the stars

  blinked like a cat. we swam

  in the last trickle of champagne

  before we knew breastmilk—we

  shared the night of the closet,

  the parasitic

  closing on our thumbprint,

  we were smudged in a yellow book.

  son, we were oak without

  mouth, uncut, we were

  brave before memory.

  Captivity

  • • •

  But even when I am at a loss to define

  the essence of freedom

  I know full well the meaning

  of captivity.

  ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  (Translated by Antony Graham)

  The Minks

  In the backyard of our house on Norwood,

  there were five hundred steel cages lined up,

  each with a wooden box

  roofed with tar paper;

  inside, two stories, with straw

  for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace

  back and forth wildly, looking for a way out;

  or else they’d hide in their wooden houses, even when

  we’d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if

  they knew they were beautiful

  and wanted to deprive us.

  In spring the placid kits

  drank with glazed eyes.

  Sometimes the mothers would go mad

  and snap their necks.

  My uncle would lift the roof like a god

  who might lift our roof, look down on us

  and take us out to safety.

  Sometimes one would escape.

  He would go down on his hands and knees,

  aiming a flashlight like

  a bullet of light, hoping to catch

  the orange gold of its eyes.

  He wore huge boots, gloves

  so thick their little teeth couldn’t bite through.

  “They’re wild,” he’d say. “Never trust them.”

  Each afternoon when I put the scoop of raw meat rich

  with eggs and vitamins on their trays,

  I’d call to each a greeting.

  Their small thin faces would follow as if slightly curious.

  In fall they went out in a van, returning

  sorted, matched, their skins hanging down on huge metal

  hangers, pinned by their mouths.

  My uncle would take them out when company came

  and drape them over his arm—the sweetest cargo.

  He’d blow down the pelts softly

  and the hairs would part for his breath

  and show the shining underlife which, like

  the shining of the soul, gives us each

  character and beauty.

  Blackbottom

  When relatives came from out of town,

  we would drive down to Blackbottom,

  drive slowly down the congested main streets

  —Beubian and Hastings—

  trapped in the mesh of Saturday night.

  Freshly escaped, black middle class,

  we snickered, and were proud;

  the louder the streets, the prouder.

  We laughed at the bright clothes of a prostitute,

  a man sitting on a curb with a bottle in his hand.

  We smelled barbecue cooking in dented washtubs,

  and our mouths watered.

  As much as we wanted it we couldn’t take the chance.

  Rhythm and blues came from the windows, the throaty voice of

  a woman lost in the bass, in the drums, in the dirty down

  and out, the grind.

  “I love to see a funeral, then I know it ain’t mine.”

  We rolled our windows down so that the waves rolled over us

  like blood.

  We hoped to pass invisibly, knowing on Monday we would

  return safely to our jobs, the post office and classroom.

  We wanted our sufferings to be offered up as tender meat,

  and our triumphs to be belted out in raucous song.

  We had lost our voice in the suburbs, in Conant Gardens,

  where each brick house delineated a fence of silence;

  we had lost the right to sing in the street and damn creation.

  We returned to wash our hands of them,

  to smell them

  whose very existence

  tore us down to the human.

  Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing

  My mother was not impressed with her beauty;

  once a year she put it on like a costume,

  plaited her black hair, slick as cornsilk, down past her hips,

  in one rope-thick braid, turned it, carefully, hand over hand,

  and fixed it at the nape of her neck, stiff and elegant as a crown,

  with tortoise pins, like huge insects,

  some belonging to her dead mother,

  some to my living grandmother.

  Sitting on the stool at the mirror,

  she applied a peachy foundation that seemed to hold her down,

  to trap her,

  as if we never would have noticed what flew among us unless

  it was weighted and bound in its mask.

  Vaseline shined her eyebrows,

  mascara blackened her lashes until they swept down like feathers,

  darkening our thoughts of her.

  Her eyes deepened until they shone from far away.

  Now I remember her hands, her poor hands, which even then

  were old from scrubbing,

  whiter on the inside than they should have been,

  and hard, the first joints of her fingers, little fattened pads,

  the nails filed to sharp points like old-fashioned ink pens,

  painted a jolly color.

  Her hands stood next to her face and wanted to be put away,

  prayed

  for the scrub bucket and brush to make them useful.

  And, as I writ
e, I forget the years I watched her

  pluck hairs like a witch from her chin, magnify

  every blotch—as if acid were thrown from the inside.

  But once a year my mother

  rose in her white silk slip,

  not the slave of the house, the woman,

  took the ironed dress from the hanger—

  allowing me to stand on the bed, so that

  my face looked directly into her face,

  and hold the garment away from her

  as she pulled it down.

  St. Peter Claver

  Every town with black Catholics has a St. Peter Claver’s.

  My first was nursery school.

  Miss Maturin made us fold our towels in a regulation square

  and nap on army cots.

  No mother questioned; no child sassed.

  In blue pleated skirts, pants, and white shirts,

  we stood in line to use the open toilets

  and conserved light by walking in darkness.

  Unsmiling, mostly light-skinned, we were the children of the

  middle class, preparing to take our parents’ places in a

  world that would demand we fold our hands and wait.

  They said it was good for us, the bowl of soup, its

  pasty whiteness;

  I learned to swallow and distrust my senses.

  On holy cards St. Peter’s face is olive-toned, his hair

  near kinky;

  I thought he was one of us who pass between the rich and poor,

  the light and dark.

  Now I read he was “a Spanish Jesuit priest who labored for

  the salvation of the African Negroes and the abolition

  of the slave trade.”

  I was tricked again, robbed of my patron,

  and left with a debt to another white man.

  The Weakness

  That time my grandmother dragged me

  through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up

  by my arm, hissing, “Stand up,”

  through clenched teeth, her eyes

  bright as a dog’s

  cornered in the light.

  She said it over and over,

  as if she were Jesus,

  and I were dead. She had been

  solid as a tree,

  a fur around her neck, a

  light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked

  on swirling

  marble and passed through

  brass openings—in 1945.

  There was not even a black

  elevator operator at Saks.

  The saleswoman had brought velvet

  leggings to lace me in, and cooed,

  as if in the service of all grandmothers.

  My grandmother had smiled, but not

  hungrily, not like my mother

  who hated them, but wanted to please,

  and they had smiled back, as if

  they were wearing wooden collars.

  When my legs gave out, my grandmother

  dragged me up and held me like God

  holds saints by the

  roots of the hair. I begged her

  to believe I couldn’t help it. Stumbling,

  her face white

  with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing

  away from those eyes

  that saw through

  her clothes, under

  her skin, all the way down

  to the transparent

  genes confessing.

  Fires in Childhood

  I. Aerial Photographs Before the Atomic Bomb

  Why did such terrible events

  catch my eye? After Hiroshima,

  I turned the picture in Life around

  in circles, trying to figure out this huge

  wheel in the middle of the air, how it

  turned, a Ferris wheel, its lights

  burning like eyes.

  The atom spinning

  on course over the sleeping,

  vulnerable planet. I turned it the way one might

  turn a kaleidoscope or prism. Even then I

  knew about the town lying under,

  like a child sleeping under the

  watchful gaze of a rapist, before the spasm

  of stopped breath, the closure at the

  scream of the throat, before the body is awakened

  along its shocked spine to bursting

  light, the legs closing, the arms,

  like a chilled flower. That eye, that spinning eye

  seeking the combustible.

  This was a heat

  I had felt already in our house on Norwood.

  Everything

  looked green, placid as a green field,

  predictable as machinery—an antique clock.

  This was the instant

  before destruction,

  the fiery atom stuck

  as if under the control of the artist

  before it spilled and became irretrievable.

  Could it be sucked back

  in its lead bag, the doors of the underbelly slammed,

  and those men who went on to

  suicide and madness, go on instead

  to become lovers, priests, Buddhist

  smilers and scholars, gardeners in the small plots

  of contained passion?

  II. The Chicago Streetcar Fire

  . . . burning out of the

  center of the Free Press, its peeling paint

  crackling like paper.

  I hid the pictures from my mother, needing to see

  those who were fried in an

  iron skillet, the men, women, children

  melted together in a crust of skin,

  a blackened hand more dense

  than charred steak, as if it had been

  forgotten in the fire years. They crammed together

  at the exit as if terror could

  leap through locked doors.

  Only a fraction of an inch

  from safety! Maybe if one had

  gone the other way—

  blood going up in flames

  like gasoline, heads torches.

  Children who did not

  escape their childhoods—

  Feathers! Ash!

  High School

  I didn’t want to be

  bunched with the black girls in the back

  of Girls Catholic Central’s cafeteria.

  They were my kin,

  but sitting there I was aware

  of that invisible wall, the others

  circling us like stars. The others:

  Gintare,

  the Ukrainian with limbs like silk and childbearing hips.

  Kathleen, who would be a nun, whose mother saw the Virgin in

  the suburbs.

  Pignalls, whose body had grown into a giant’s, who towered

  over the gold prom queens, not like a man, but a child who

  had grown into a monster, her broken speech a path out of

  herself she could not follow.

  Donna, her hair hanging over her face like a veil—her knees

  made for kneeling, her stomach for fasts, her genitals for

  the loneliness of the cot, but the rest of her unable to hold

  up holiness.

  Jo, who let boys penetrate and shrugged off other wisdoms;

  her long eyelashes held grains of sand, as if tiny pieces of

  eternity were working themselves through her.

  Lenore, whose square body threatened the narrow pews;

  expelled, who lived in the back of a White Tower with her

  first woman lover.

  Marty, whose palate and teeth stuck out, like some hairy

  specimen of our ancestors, alone with her mother, sleeping

  on the pull-out cot.

  None of them called me nigger;

  but they were ignorant

  as God of our suffering.

  H
amtramck: The Polish Women

  What happens to the beautiful girls with slender hips and

  bright round dresses?

  One day they disappear without leaving a trace of themselves,

  and the next they appear again, dragging a heavy

  shopping cart from the bakery to the pork store with

  packages of greasy sausage and potatoes.

  Like old nuns they waddle down the main street, past the rich

  gaudy cathedral with the little infant of Prague—in

  real clothes—linens they tend lovingly, starch in

  steamy buckets (their hands thick as potatoes, white),

  and iron with dignity.

  The Struggle

  We didn’t want to be white—or did we?

  What did we want?

  In two bedrooms, side by side,

  four adults, two children.

  My aunt and uncle left before light.

  My father went to the factory, then the cleaners.

  My mother vacuumed, ironed, cooked,

  pasted war coupons. In the afternoon

  she typed stencils at the metal kitchen table.

  I crawled under pulling on her skirt.

  What did we want?

  As the furniture became modern, the carpet deep, the white

  ballerina on the mantel lifted her arms like some girl near

  terror;

  the Degas ballerinas folded softly in a group, a gray sensual

  beauty.

  What did we push ourselves out of ourselves

  to do? Our hands

  on the doors, cooking utensils, keys; our hands

  folding the paper money, tearing the paid bills.

  Before Making Love

  I move my hands over your face,

  closing my eyes, as if blind;

  the cheek bones, broadly spaced,

  the wide thick nostrils of the African,

  the forehead whose bones push

  at both sides as if the horns

  of new-fallen angels lie just under,

  the chin that juts forward with pride.

  I think of the delicate skull of the Taung child—

  earliest of human beings

  emerged from darkness—whose geometry

  brings word of a small town of dignity

  that all the bloody kingdoms rest on.

  [The Taung child is a fossil, a juvenile

  Australopithecus africanus, from Taung,

  South Africa, two million years old.]

  On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings

  The restaurant is empty

  except for the cooks and waiters.

  One makes a pillow of linens