I
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• • •
When I knew I would not “get well,” that I would never be the girl my parents wanted, that no matter how much therapy I did and how many books I wrote, I was stuck with myself, that I had to accept my past and live with it; then I knew my parents’ struggles. They too battled demons that they couldn’t make go away, no matter how much they suffered, no matter what they did or said, no matter how much they wanted to love me and be good.
• • •
Then I gave them credit for what they did right, for what they accomplished: the weekly salary, the food on the table, the beauty of face, for understanding the contours of delicacy, of speech; and for the inner strength: the piercing gray-green eyes that saw good and evil, the gravedigger’s determination and necessity.
• • •
Then, too, I realized that my fear, that knee-jerk response, has a twin, an aspect that arises from the same infant sprout: the part that forgets sorrow and is out in the world playing, that notices the first gold light lying on the airy branches of the willow in spring—an image that comes unbidden.
• • •
There is a picture of my father holding me when I was just a few months old. We are standing in front of the bungalow my family shared with my aunt and uncle until I was seven. Above my father’s head, you can see the window in the one large finished area of the attic where we lived, a door and thin wall away from bare wood beams and summer’s blistering heat. I don’t remember why someone snapped us; perhaps it was a celebration—my mother’s birthday was in July, I would have been four months old—my father is in a casual shirt with open collar and plain pants, a working man’s clothes. There we are in that first public document: I with a look of obvious discomfort, perhaps even the smugness of a little judge; and he looking off-balance, as if someone had just thrown him a bundle of live snakes. He doesn’t know what to do with me. What part of himself does he not know how to hold? My lips are sealed, almost puckered in displeasure. I am either not yet afraid to show my feelings, or else the very brain doesn’t know enough yet to hide me. He too looks inexperienced; in tenderness and violence, he is a novice, a beginner, a baby.
• • •
Once in a dream I saw my father as a pasty white dog, starved, ignorant, graceless; I said to myself, that is what evil looks like. As I grew stronger, my father grew weaker, until a frightened boy lived inside me. “Rest here now safe near your daughter.” In bringing myself forth, I had become his protector.
• • •
the poem is change
the poem in change
the end of the poem is change
to change in the poem
to change by the poem
to hold the change
in the poem
to be changed by the poem
(the poem is change)
to change by writing the poem
(the writing is change)
to hold the change in the writing
to hold the change by writing
to breathe through the change
to write through the change
to breathe by writing
to write by breathing
to change by breathing
the change is breathing
to hold the breath
to hold the writing
to hold the change
to hold it
& let it go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of the new poems in this book were previously published in the following magazines. I am grateful to the editors.
American Poetry Review: “The intimates,” “Homage,” “As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn’t change,” “After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading,” and “Watching a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God”; Birmingham Poetry Review: “Biographia Literararia Africana,” “New Orleans palmetto bug,” “My father in old age,” “Pantoum for the Broken,” “Streaming,” “Lauds,” “Midnight: Long Train Passing,” and “The Peaches of August”; Lips: “Black woman as magician at CVS,” “The most surprising and necessary ingredient in my mothers spaghetti sauce,” and “The Glimpse”; Missouri Review: “What are you?”; The New Yorker: “I give in to an old desire”; Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets: “Elegy for my husband” and “The blessed angels” (“Blessed angels”); Poems for Jerry: A Tribute to Gerald Stern: “Jerry Stern’s friendship”; Poetry: “Speculations about ‘I’”; Prairie Schooner: “To the reader on publication of poems about the abuse in my childhood” (“An apology to the reader”), “Bad Dad,” and “On knowing a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth”; Tin House: “Gifts from the dead” and “Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly”; Under a Warm Green Linden: “La fille aux cheveux de lin.”
I am especially grateful to ones who nurtured the young poet in me. I daily remember those who have passed on, who provided a safe space: Eleanora Ports, Isabelle Tucker, Amanda LaCroix, Clarence Robinson, Fred Schwartz, and Bruce Derricotte; and all who fed my early joys, especially my cousins Olivia Abner and Sylvia Hollowell.
Much love and gratitude to my families; to supporters who listened, understood, and helped me when I needed help; and to all who made the writing of these poems possible. With special thanks to my editor, Ed Ochester, for the genius of his vision of American poetry, and for his gentle touch on my psyche at just the right moment throughout the years.
I am most grateful to the universe for the community of Cave Canem. We imagined a place in which black folks were safe to write the poems they needed to write. I send enormous love to the fellows, to all who gave (and give!) of their gifts, and worked (and work!) so hard to make that space happen.
I am grateful to our poetry forbearers, and to all of our ancestors, for the gift of survival.