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Family Secrets
They told my cousin Rowena not to marry
Calvin—she was too young, just eighteen,
& he was too dark, too too dark, as if he
had been washed in what we wanted
to wipe off our hands. Besides, he didn’t come
from a good family. He said he was going
to be a lawyer, but we didn’t quite believe.
The night they eloped to the Gotham Hotel,
the whole house whispered—as if we were ashamed
to tell it to ourselves. My aunt and uncle
rushed down to the Gotham to plead —
we couldn’t imagine his hands on her!
Families are conceived in many ways.
The night my cousin Calvin lay
down on her, that idol with its gold skin
broke, & many of the gods we loved
in secret were freed.
After a Reading at a Black College
Maybe one day we will have
written about this color thing
until we’ve solved it. Tonight
when I read my poems about
looking white, the audience strains
forward with their whole colored
bodies—a part of each person praying
that my poems will make sense.
Poems do that sometimes—take
the craziness and salvage some
small clear part of the soul,
and that is why, though frightened,
I don’t stop the spirit. After,
though some people come
to speak to me, some
seem to step away,
as if I’ve hurt them once
too often and they have
no forgiveness left. I feel myself
hurry from person to person, begging.
Hold steady, Harriet Tubman whispers,
Don’t flop around.
Oh my people,
sometimes you look at me
with such unwillingness—
as I look at you!
I keep trying to prove
I am not what I think you think.
For Black Women Who Are Afraid
A black woman comes up to me at break in the writing
workshop and reads me her poem, but she says she
can’t read it out loud because
there’s a woman in a car on her way
to work and her hair is blowing in the breeze
and, since her hair is blowing, the woman must be
white, and she shouldn’t write about a white woman
whose hair is blowing, because
maybe the black poets will think she wants to be
that woman and be mad at her and say she hates herself,
and maybe they won’t let her explain
that she grew up in a white neighborhood
and it’s not her fault, it’s just what she sees.
But she has to be so careful. I tell her to write
the poem about being afraid to write,
and we stand for a long time like that,
respecting each other’s silence.
Passing
A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re
reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black
students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks
think they can fool other blacks,
but I can always tell,” looking
right through me.
After I tell them I am black,
I ask the class, “Was I passing
when I was just sitting here,
before I told you?” A white woman
shakes her head desperately, as if
I had deliberately deceived her.
She keeps examining my face,
then turning away
as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume
“passing” is based on what I leave out
and not what she fills in?
In one scene in the book, in a restaurant,
she’s “passing,”
though no one checked her at the door—
“Hey, you black?”
My father, who looked white,
told me this story: every year
when he’d go to get his driver’s license,
the man at the window filling
out the form would ask,
“White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up.
My father wouldn’t pass, but he might
use silence to trap a devil.
When he didn’t speak, the man
would look up at my father’s face.
“What did he write?”
my father quizzed me.
Bookstore
I ask the clerk to show me children’s books. I say,
“I’m buying something for my nephew, Goodnight Moon.
Are there others you can recommend?” She pulls down
six or seven and I stop her, “Any written by or for black folks?”
She looks as if she doesn’t understand. Maybe she has never
heard the words black folks before. Maybe she thinks
I’m white and mean it as a put-down. Since I’m white-
looking, I better make it clear. “It’s for my brother’s son.
‘black folks,’ black people . . . you know . . . like me!”
As quickly as she can, she pulls books from the lower
shelves and loads my arms until the books are falling on the floor.
She wants me to know she’s helpful. That her store has so many
to choose from, I couldn’t load them in a van. “Thank you, thank you,
that’s plenty!” For a moment, history shifts its burden
to her shoulders, and the names of the missing are clear.
Invisible Dreams
La poesie vit d’insomnie perpetuelle
RENE CHAR
There’s a sickness in me. During
the night I wake up & it’s brought
a stain into my mouth, as if
an ocean has risen & left back
a stink on the rocks of my teeth.
I stink. My mouth is ugly, human
stink. A color like rust
is in me. I can’t get rid of it.
It rises after I
brush my teeth, a taste
like iron. In the
night, left like a dream,
a caustic light
washes over the insides of me.
• • •
What to do with my arms? They
coil out of my body
like snakes.
They branch & spit.
I want to shake myself
until they fall like withered
roots; until
they bend the right way—
until I fit in them,
or they in me.
I have to lay them down as
carefully as an old wedding dress,
I have to fold them
like the arms of someone dead.
The house is quiet; all
night I struggle. All
because of my arms,
which have no peace!
• • •
I’m a martyr, a girl who’s been dead
two thousand years. I turn
on my left side, like one comfortable
after a long, hard death.
The angels look down
tenderly. “She’s sleeping,” they say
& pass me by. But
all night, I am passing
in & out of my body
on my naked feet.
• • •
I’m awake when I’m sleeping & I’m
sleeping when I’m awake, & no one
knows, not even me, for my eyes
are closed to myself.
I think I am thinking I see
a man beside me, & he thinks
in his sl
eep that I’m awake
writing. I hear a pen scratch
a paper. There is some idea
I think is clever: I want to
capture myself in a book.
• • •
I have to make a
place for my body in
my body. I’m like a
dog pawing a blanket
on the floor. I have to
turn & twist myself
like a rag until I
can smell myself in myself.
I’m sweating; the water is
pouring out of me
like silver. I put my head
in the crook of my arm
like a brilliant moon.
• • •
The bones of my left foot
are too heavy on the bones
of my right. They
lie still for a little while,
sleeping, but soon they
bruise each other like
angry twins. Then
the bones of my right foot
command the bones of my left
to climb down.
Two Poems
Peripheral
Maybe it’s a bat’s wings
at the corner of your eye, right
where the eyeball swivels
into its pocket. But when
the brown of your eye turns
where you thought the white saw,
there’s only air and gold light,
reality—as your mother defined it—
milk/no milk. Not for years
did you learn the word “longing,”
and only then did you see the bat—
just the fringe of its wings
beating, its back in a heavy
black cloak.
Bird
The secret is
not to be afraid, to
pour the salt, letting your wrist
be free—there is almost
never too much; it sits on top of the skin like a
little crystal casket. Under it the bird might
imagine another life, one in which it is grateful
for pleasing, can smell
itself cooking—the taste
of carrots, onions, potatoes stewed
in its own juice—and forget
the dreams of blood
coursing out of its throat like a river.
1:30 A.M.
She can’t sleep.
Is she unhappy? Depressed?
Does she need a pill? Is it
her nature? Bottom line: to endure
& write. No pills, no end to
therapy
in sight.
Is there a woman in there
who can’t speak?
___________________________
It’s herself
she can’t stand.
She’s her own worst enemy.
That’s obvious.
Without herself she’d be much better off,
happy, successful,
able to take what she wanted, at least, ask,
good things would mean
something,
be a stepping stone.
“You start & build & tear it all down,”
a fortune-teller says.
___________________________
She was miserable.
She left her husband.
She’s still miserable.
Did she do the wrong thing?
Was her old misery just an illusion of
her new one, or vice versa?
Perhaps, eventually, if she had stuck it out,
she would have opened like a saint, gained true
cheerfulness, the kind that makes old people’s
faces gleam, & be grateful for each little gift.
How can you tell whether, ever, to go forward
or remain? trapped?
bearing what won’t abate?
What the Buddhists call
“The Wisdom of no escape,”
the Christians call
hell.
She meditates.
___________________________
Her father owned a dog that used to hate
him. Whenever the dog would come up from the basement
he’d paw at the door
to go back down. He’d lie down by her father’s recliner as if he were
trying to make him happy,
to show him, really, you aren’t so bad.
Finally, he couldn’t
take his own desire,
he’d start shifting, lifting
up, he’d whine like a dog
who has to pee.
He just wanted
to go back down there by himself
where it was cool & dark, the way someone
with a terrible headache will want to be
left alone, with a cool rag on her head.
Once, to get away, he jumped through the glass door in the kitchen.
and ran down the street bleeding.
Her father told the story as if he were bragging—
that something near him could be that afraid!
___________________________
You’ll never get better.
That thought keeps recurring.
You could get worse. A lot worse.
Some poet leapt off of a bridge.
You wouldn’t do that.
You would check into the nearest hospital,
like a cheap hotel you could
always get a room in
if you discovered a huge roach in your bed.
___________________________
Where’s the victory?
Where’s the meat?
A friend comes to the Village in 1970 & falls in love with a
hot dog.
Nathan’s The All Beef Hot Dog
the sign says;
ten years later he comes back & notices
a change,
Nathan’s The All Meat Hot Dog
and ten years later, another change,
Nathan’s The All American Hot Dog
Memory fades, a few good
jokes remain.
___________________________
Sex?
Catalogs may be necessary,
like those seeds that come from
faraway places that produce
the best flowers.
Dildos of all different colors!
The mailman lugs their weight
knowledgeably,
in spite of the euphemistic names.
For a logo,
there’s a woman from a Picasso painting
with a satisfied grin & her hand on her belly.
Mona Lisa wore that look
a woman of a certain age would know.
A woman who knows how to please herself
is gentle,
is her own best lover.
___________________________
The man in the bookstore on Craig asks,
“Where have you been for the last eight years?”
You didn’t think he knew your name.
“Buried,” you answer.
Maybe you were like those locusts, red-eyed,
eating.
“Your shoulders used to be boxy,
as if you were always trying.
You’re milder now,” an old friend explains.
Dead Baby Speaks
i am taking in taking in
like a lump of a dead baby
on the floor mama kicks me
i don’t feel anything
___________________________
i am taking in taking in
i am reading newspapers
i am seeing films
i am reading poetry
i am listening to psychiatrists, friends
someone knows the way
someone will be my mother
& tell me what to think
___________________________
the dead baby wants to scr
eam
the dead baby wants to drink warm milk
the dead baby wants to say to her mother
i can’t always say the right thing
i’m not perfect
but i will not be a lump on the floor
the dead baby wants to kick her mother
the dead baby wants her mother to lie down & let herself be kicked
why not she let father do it
___________________________
how to separate
me from the dead baby
my mother from me
my mother from the dead baby
___________________________
nothing is expected
nothing is expected
of you
you don’t have to do this or say that
nothing is known
just be be who you are
a little defiance a little defense
say, if you want
i lifted up a little
___________________________
there is that stunned moment when she shuts up & lets me speak
i have nothing to say
___________________________
then i say
rotten mother who opened your legs
like iron gates & forced me into this prison
who lay among lilies & pressed me to your breasts, saying i will never be alone
again
who wanted my soul for company, used my body in the place of your soul
who brought me up to the surface by straining off the rich dark broth
until what remained was as vaporous as the shadow of a shadow
whose breasts were bruised fruits
whose legs were swollen tree trunks, but when you were shaken, only one red apple
fell
whose genitals hold me tethered, a string like a primate’s tail, so that i am your
monkey in the red hat, you are my organ grinder
if you say do not write about me
i will write more
there are many more mouths to feed
than yours
my life is juice pouring
out of me
let it find a channel
___________________________
i could knuckle under & be good
i could pray for her & turn the other cheek
i could live in her house with her sickness like a stinking body in the stairwell
i could bake bread until my hands puff off
i could sweep the floor
i could suck misery out of my teeth like stringy meat
i could poison her with a plate of sorrow
i could leave the door open on her corpse so that no breath would warm her back to
resurrection
i could throw myself at her feet
i could languish like a whore in colored rags
i could lie as still as a still life