The End of the Alphabet
The End of the Alphabet
Claudia Rankine
Copyright © 1998 by Claudia Rankine
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Rankine, Claudia, 1963–
The end of the alphabet / Claudia Rankine.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9853-2
I. Title.
PS3568.A572E536 1998
811’.54—dc21 98-24717
CIP
Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of the following journals in which a number of these poems, sometimes in a different form, first appeared: Boston Review, The Marlboro Review, The Mississippi Review, PEQUOD, and The Southern Review.
Many thanks to my dear friends who read and commented on these poems. Especially to Mary Jo Bang. And Sophie Cabot Black, Mark Rudman, Maggie Winslow, and Mark Wunderlich. Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown, merci. My gratitude to Richard Howard.
Special thanks also to the MacDowell Colony.
Design by Laura Hammond Hough
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
for John Peter Lucas
Contents
Overview is a place
Elsewhere, things tend
Testimonial
Toward biography
Hunger to the table
Extent and root of
Residual in the hour
Dirtied up
Where is the sea?
Cast away moan
In this sense, beyond
The quotidian
There is a lot of talking going on
masked in retelling because the feeling forgiven is too much.
The End of the Alphabet
Overview is a place
*
Difficult to pinpoint
fear of self, uncoiled.
specter unstrung. staggering stampede. Which
sung? left the body open for the moon to break into,
unspooling disadvantage.
Give a thought, Jane: Did filth
begin in conversation? drag
the mood through before escaping the ugliness. Not to
dwell on but overhear footsteps again
approaching: immured,
not immune, then dumdum
bullet templed. rip the mind out. go ahead.
*
Dawn will clear though the night rains so hard. Rain
and Jane mix and mixing up, thinking shore but hugging floor.
What Jane must substitute for this year’s substitute
for a mind intact? fire?
its greediness egged on, flame after flame
uninvolved
but still fueling the shifting onslaught.
Gray Jane
emphasize otherwise, not the eyes
but the cheek to the pillow. Bundle up and sweep
bare the mind. Land its ooze
at some other gate, soften
dead wood. Sea smoke, drizzle, distance. The moment
of elucidation snipped its tongue, its mouth water
dried out—
thought-damaged throat.
*
Remember a future
from another dream
and hold on. open your mouth
close to your ear: fear
in sanity lives. anatomy
as dissonance,
vertebral breaking. In spite
of yourself.
rising, the mercury
reaching out
to fever. fire. all your civilized
sense, Jane. disabled.
*
Assurance collapses naturally
as if each word were a dozen rare birds
flown away. And gone
elsewhere is their guaranteed landing
though the orphaned wish
to be happy was never withdrawn.
Do not face assault uncoiled as loss,
as something turned down: request or sheet. Pray
to the dear earth, Jane, always freshly turned,
pull the covers overhead and give
and take the easier piece.
to piece the mind.
to gather on tiptoe. Having lost
somewhere, without a name to call, help
yourself. all I want.
Elsewhere, things tend
*
Viewed in this way,
… her voice
at any distance cannot be
heavier than her eyes. Listen, among the missing
is what interrupts, stops her short
far from here in ways that break to splinter.
Until the sense that put her here is forced
to look
before remembering the towel that wiped sweat
and wet face and dust from each mirror:
she cleans her glasses with that. So in the end
is this defeat?
She thinks in it we are
as washed-out road, as burnt-down, ash.
Dismiss the air and after her gesture, there,
the thrown off—
*
This then is—
It remains as dusk with the hour, feeling looted
in the body
though every shadow is accounted for.
Who to tell, I am nothing and without you,
when good comes, every hand in greeting. There is
no reasoning with need.
I coach myself, speak to my open mouth,
but whatever abandons, whatever leaves me sick,
a rock in each hand, on the shoulder of some road,
its nights unmediated, its dogs expected,
knows its nakedness unseduced:
(cruelty that stays, cut loose
—its voice keeps on,
meaning empty, the mood reproachful, faint. Don’t think.
Don’t argue. Surfaced again: This
plummeting, pulled back, sudden no—
which cannot be given up as though one never hears back,
as though all the seats are taken. This
—drawn out of bounds
without advantage and knowing, my God, what is probable is
this coming to the end, not desperate for, not enraged.
At first, embarrassed, lumbering beneath the formal poses,
the well-cuffed, the combed hairs, the could-not-be-faulted
statement of ease, though utterly
and depleted, closing the door behind, for in
this, the distance—wanting and the body losing, all the time
losing, beforehand, inside.
*
Similar also,
each gesture offering a hand to the atmosphere, like a wave,
until it’s realized the one I’m waving to can’t see me anymore.
Or is it my back turned? Me who leaves?
If I remind myself all of us weep, wake, whisper
in the same dark, and the sudden footfall or the longer silence
separates us beyond each locked door, I am returned
only to my o
wn. And am reluctant to complain as if
exaggerated is the high water, as if it didn’t swallow thousands,
these fossils, this bone, as if between us are not many
extremes: the taste of blood in our mouths though the blows
are seldom physical. What I wish to communicate is that
it can be too late: this life offering sorrow as voice, leaving
nothing to shadow. I want to say, a life can take a life away.
Testimonial
*
As if I craved error, as if love were ahistorical,
I came to live in a country not at first my own
and here came to love a man not stopped by reticence.
And because it seemed right
love of this man would look like freedom,
the lone expanse of his back
would be found land, I turned,
as a brown field turns, suddenly grown green,
for this was the marriage waited for: the man
desiring as I, movement toward mindful and yet.
It was June, brilliant. The sun higher than God.
*
In this bed, a man on his back, his eyes graying blue.
It is hurricane season. Sparrows flying in, out the wind.
His lips receiving. He is a shore. The Atlantic rushing.
Clouds opening in the late June storm. This,
as before, in the embrace that takes all my heart.
Imagine his unshaven face, his untrimmed nails, as all
the hurt this world could give.
*
Gnaw. Zigzag. The end of the alphabet buckling floors.
How to come up?
The blue-crown motmot cannot negotiate narrow branches,
but then her wings give way, betray struggle,
intention broken off in puffy cumulus.
I wished him inside again.
Touched him. Feathery
was the refusal,
drawing together what thirsts. His whole self holding me in,
we slept on the edge of overrunning
* * *
with parakeets nesting
in porch lights and dying hibiscus covering the ground.
(a dry season choked in dust, etched cracks in dirt roads,
children down from the hills in the sweat of night
to steal water.
Plastic containers in those hands,
over the gate to my house. I lie here, my head
on the prime minister’s belly, listening: urgency
swallowed by worried stillness
enveloped again by movement, before, finally,
the outside tap turns tentatively on—
*
Lower the lids and the mind swims out into
what is not madness, and still the body
feels small
against such flooding hurled through the dull and certain dawn.
You, you are defeat composed.
The atmosphere crippled brings you to your knees. You are
again where we find ourselves dragged.
Your hand, that vagary in shadow.
So soon you were distanced from error. Nakedness
boiled down to gray days: hair in the drain, dead skin
dunning shower water. The morning cannot
be picked through, not be sorted out. Clearly, you know,
so say, This earth untouched is ruptured enough to grieve.
Toward biography
*
Who distributes the live or die
after juice is refused, the egg is fried?
Faced with its staggering number of runny noses
the day begins, begins again, talks above
the motor left running.
Then I pay what I am asked to pay
to enter the kiss,
the low bow
that does not touch the forehead to a scatter of needles
because the dove never comes
when the distance from wreckage to shore
is rimmed with yearning
suggesting once upon a time, our addiction to telling,
is all effort to shape what surfaces within the sane.
*
Ignore your own devastation and it doggedly shadows, resurfacing
across the first version, the flat world, forcing you within
the real conversation you hold with yourself.
If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this?
Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.
Or milk on the tongue tasted rude, unfortunate. And hunger
awoke as human. On all sides, riddled. Broken
and broke against. Inside, by earlier years, shook.
I am remembering the hours lived in, steep steps
angled, and the going up and down burdened before
the certain hand went out, pushed—
if only—
or to go again, doing nothing
to stop hurt releasing a body out. We live through, survive
without regard for the self. Forgiving
each day insisting it be forgiven, thinking
our lives umbilical, tied up with living with how far
we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner.
*
Inconsolable outdoorness of the heart
and the self—not to bridge that—with limbs vexed,
irises fretting the skinniest of hopes, out of wall cracks, upended
intestines, these organs, this imageless throat, much more than mud
locked together, microscopic genes, freezing surface of spleen,
crush of leaves beneath until the fragmented shadow
readjusts, until who I am differs. Then to pray from this body,
waiting—Dear, heart, you break in two. You do not break into.
*
Privately,
dukes up, duel or duck, beat on,
or laughter: swollen, leaking in
to appeal, To die.
For in the hysteria, craven.
To the life loved: I have given
my hand, my word:
solemn, the oath. And yet, still here, I am
cringing into
or tipped in the bone: no cushion here.
And the next minute with no clear word to speak
and sore-shouldered,
feeling foolishly subdued,
I do not say (not yet,
not quite), Reasoned out—Telephoned,
I’ll meet the party: dulcet is the Dubonnet
and yet the face cannot turn to turn the blind eye,
so monstrous is the stretch
across this cloudy spot on the cornea.
The resolution: to outride, outride: (what
the blues pull in. And in,
I don’t know, I arrived unprepared for the lobed, dark-
grayed matter of “wearisome” and cannot weep
so cannot wake scaled-back,
calm, outside the mirror.
*
as if anguishing should be excrement:
a flabby stink unbandaged
left out overnight:
as if anguishing should be
seeping intrusion hacked into:
as if anguishing:
*
The plunging. This time complex
neckline. This time phlegmatic
clavicle unburied—
which is a complicated situation.
His bibulous baby pulls her knees in.
When she gets to be happy
she is happy, but every smile this time
is a transaction—
fluey, bluesy, she is, she isn’t.
Any other night he would have
wanted to bed her, his red carpet runaway,
his simper silly—
black mascaraed down to her ankle,
unavailable tonight,
* * *
over the counter comes (win
k wink)
points of upturned lip. crow’s-feet
embellishing the split eye.
roll away the nonsense. crumple.
cancel the flaming hoop.
feel sorry don’t.
take out the bathwater (slippery
the floor). sit down the long while.
*
(mosquitoes abundant. limit of white wall. stray thread. this tendency to worsen. the lowest throw at dice. the smallest amount. no subtleties. no who calls through the door. far from. skin enclosing. low-slung treachery. threat of. giving thirst back to the table. drawn breath holding. the shut eye.
peekaboo—
A she collapsing. some possible. some coherence unfastened.
nothing acceptable. nothing stitched together:
one mind but that mind cannot—
______________as if the world, extrinsic,
were methodically the wrong fountain, the one where water
is stagnant, the drainage blocked by nature’s things: leaves,
moss, dirt the wind put here:
I apologize, but I do not apologize.
*
(to sit next to the self.
to wait. the chair next to the bed.
to wait. and not for this.
to wait. so, naturally
in some wish working the way a grin does, stupidly
sweet.
in the before. the after. and before. October, a dull red.
on the way to. a morning’s incoherence. all teeth and gum.
as the smell of fire lingers without warmth. the fact imprisoned
in wrong mind.
in plain sight. circling the light like moths. like ashes.
to wait. in the way of.
to wait. either way. waiting.
* * *
And like the ones who can see what the day sees
but cannot hold its vision in destiny, I understand
and the agility to understand makes no difference:
The End of the Alphabet Page 1
