seven for keeping
somewhere there is a chronicle
naming my mother
how could i be womantrue
dancing in a house of men
even when i gathered
foreign wives and concubines
i would tend them as i tended
sheep
but when i ripped my robe
and wailed and wept upon the earth
i was grieving for men and i knew it
for my Lord my brothers fathers sons
david has slain his ten thousands
i would rise from my covering
and walk at night
to escape the ten thousand
bloody voices
yet i am a man
after God’s own heart
when i hung the hands
of my enemy to the square
they came to clutch my dreams
at night
what does He love,
my wrath or my regret?
to michal
Michal . . . looked through a window and saw
King David leaping and dancing before the
Lord; and she despised him in her heart.
—II Samuel 6:16
moving and moaning
under our coverings
i could only guess
what women know
but wife
in the open arms of God
i became man and woman
filling and emptying
all at once
and oh the astonishment
of seed
dancing on the ground
as i leaped and turned
surrendering
not what i had withheld from you
but michal from myself.
enemies
for wayne karlin
evening.
i creep
into the tent
of saul.
for his sake
i have learned
the taste of blood.
in battle
i would drink his
and he mine.
we have become
enemies
yet here
he is an old man
sleeping
or my father.
i will remove
his armaments
his sword
his shield.
come morning
he will know himself
naked but alive
and i will remember
myself also. david.
the poet david.
beloved
jonathan the son of saul
did love me
and michal the daughter of saul
did love me
and israel and judah all
and honey was heaped upon my head
and the sword of goliath the giant
was given into my hand
and every harp and timbrel sang with
what doth thy soul desire
and i did not know
until one eventide i walked out
onto the roof of the king’s house
bathsheba
how it was it was
as if all of the blood in my body
gorged
into my loin
so that even my fingers grew stiff
but cold
and the heat of my rod
was my only burning
desire
desire my only fire
and whether i loved her
i could not say but
i wanted her whatever she was
whether a curse
or the wife of uriah
the prophet
came to me
with a poor man’s tale
of his one ewe lamb
sworn to him by seven
pieces of gold
and a tale of the greed
of a rich man
hungry for not his own
supper
who stole that lamb
and i in my arrogance
did swear by the fate
of my house and my kingdom
vengeance
oh the crack in my heart
when the prophet tolled
david
thou art the man
oh absalom my son my son
even as i turned myself from you
i longed to hold you oh
my wild haired son
running in the wilderness away
from me from us
into a thicket you could not foresee
if you had stayed
i feared you would kill me
if you left i feared you would die
oh my son
my son
what does the Lord require
david, musing
it was i who faced the lion and the bear
who gathered the five smooth stones
and the name of the first was hunger
and the name of the second was faith
and the name of the third was lyric
and passion the fourth and the fifth
was the stone of my regret it was hunger
that brought the gore of the giant’s head
into my hand
the others i fastened under my tongue
for later for her for israel for my sons
what manner of man
if i am not singing to myself
to whom then? each sound, each word
is a way of wondering that first
brushed against me in the hills
when i was an unshorn shepherd boy.
each star that watched my watching then
was a mouth that would not speak.
what is a man? what am i?
even when i am dancing now i am dancing
myself onto the tongue of heaven
hoping to move into some sure
answer from the Lord.
how can this david love himself,
be loved (i am singing and spinning now)
if he stands in the tents of history
bloody skull in one hand, harp in the other?
Blessing the Boats
(2000)
for Russell
1963–1997
the beautiful boy
has entered
the beautiful city
new poems
the times
it is hard to remain human on a day
when birds perch weeping
in the trees and the squirrel eyes
do not look away but the dog ones do
in pity.
another child has killed a child
and i catch myself relieved that they are
white and i might understand except
that i am tired of understanding.
if this
alphabet could speak its own tongue
it would be all symbol surely;
the cat would hunch across the long table
and that would mean time is catching up,
and the spindle fish would run to ground
and that would mean the end is coming
and the grains of dust would gather themselves
along the streets and spell out:
these too are your children this too is your child
signs
when the birds begin to walk
when the crows in their silk tuxedos
stand in the road and watch
as oncoming traffic swerves to avoid
the valley of dead things
when the geese reject the sky
and sit on the apron of highway 95
one wing pointing north the other south
and what does it mean this morning
when a man runs wild eyed from his car
shirtless and shoeless his palms spread wide
into the jungle of traffic into a world
gone awry the birds beginning to walk
the man almost naked almost cawi
ng
almost lifting straining to fly
moonchild
whatever slid into my mother’s room that
late june night, tapping her great belly,
summoned me out roundheaded and unsmiling.
is this the moon, my father used to grin,
cradling me? it was the moon
but nobody knew it then.
the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.
we girls were ten years old and giggling
in our hand-me-downs. we wanted breasts,
pretended that we had them, tissued
our undershirts. jay johnson is teaching
me to french kiss, ella bragged, who
is teaching you? how do you say; my father?
the moon is queen of everything.
she rules the oceans, rivers, rain.
when I am asked whose tears these are
I always blame the moon.
dialysis
after the cancer, the kidneys
refused to continue.
they closed their thousand eyes.
blood fountains from the blind man’s
arm and decorates the tile today.
somebody mops it up.
the woman who is over ninety
cries for her mother. if our dead
were here they would save us.
we are not supposed to hate
the dialysis unit. we are not
supposed to hate the universe.
this is not supposed to happen to me.
after the cancer the body refused
to lose any more. even the poisons
were claimed and kept
until they threatened to destroy
the heart they loved. in my dream
a house is burning.
something crawls out of the fire
cleansed and purified.
in my dream i call it light.
after the cancer i was so grateful
to be alive. i am alive and furious.
Blessed be even this?
donor
to lex
when they tell me that my body
might reject
i think of thirty years ago
and the hangers i shoved inside
hard trying to not have you.
i think of the pills, the everything
i gathered against your
inconvenient bulge; and you
my stubborn baby child,
hunched there in the dark
refusing my refusal.
suppose my body does say no
to yours. again, again i feel you
buckled in despite me, lex,
fastened to life like the frown
on an angel’s brow.
libation
north carolina, 1999
i offer to this ground,
this gin.
i imagine an old man
crying here
out of the overseer’s sight,
pushing his tongue
through where a tooth
would be if he were whole.
the space aches
where his tooth would be,
where his land would be, his
house his wife his son
his beautiful daughter.
he wipes his sorrow from
his cheek, then
puts his thirsty finger
to his thirsty tongue
and licks the salt.
i call a name that
could be his.
this offering
is for you old man;
this salty ground,
this gin.
the photograph: a lynching
is it the cut glass
of their eyes
looking up toward
the new gnarled branch
of the black man
hanging from a tree?
is it the white milk pleated
collar of the woman
smiling toward the camera,
her fingers loose around
a christian cross drooping
against her breast?
is it all of us
captured by history into an
accurate album? will we be
required to view it together
under a gathering sky?
jasper texas 1998
for j. byrd
i am a man’s head hunched in the road.
i was chosen to speak by the members
of my body. the arm as it pulled away
pointed toward me, the hand opened once
and was gone.
why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?
the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it.
the townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust. i am done.
alabama 9/15/63
Have you heard the one about
the shivering lives,
the never to be borne daughters and sons,
the one about Cynthia and Carole and Denise and Addie
Mae?
Have you heard the one about
the four little birds
shattered into skylarks in the white
light of Birmingham?
Have you heard how the skylarks,
known for their music,
swooped into heaven, how the sunday
morning strains shook the piano, how the blast
is still too bright to hear them play?
what i think when i ride the train
maybe my father
made these couplers.
his hands were hard
and black and swollen,
the knuckles like lugs
or bolts in a rich man’s box.
he broke a bone each year
as if on schedule.
when i read about a wreck,
how the cars buckle
together or hang from the track
in a chain, but never separate,
i think; see,
there’s my father,
he was a chipper,
he made the best damn couplers
in the whole white world.
praise song
to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.
i was ten. i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.
august
for laine
what would we give,
my sister,
to roll our weak
and foolish brother
back onto his bed,
to face him with his sins
and blame him
for them?
what would we give
to fuss with him again,
he who clasped his hands
as if in prayer and melted
to our mother? what
would we give
to smile and staple him
back into our arms,
our honey boy, our sam,
not clean, not sober, not
better than he was, but
oh, at least, alive?
study the masters
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.
lazarus
first day
i rose from stiffening
into a pin of light
and a voice calling
“Lazarus, this way”
and i floated or rather
swam in a river of sound
toward what seemed to be
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 Page 18
