I read a thread from dreams to joy to water to Lorde’s erotic. I read a verse that does not abide by the forgetting that others want this water woman to abide. In the waters of this poem swirls another of her poems:
why some people be mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
So then what is water? What can it be?
The element. Daily, ordinary, enduring. Extraordinary, shiftful, expansive. A word for what one is thirsty for. Desire. What can quench. What can be swum and what cannot be swum. The Atlantic. Middle Passages. The distance between this and that. That which cannot be held for long in bare hands but can be carried. The sky, the river, the rain. Knowing and unknowing. Ancestral. Elder, our singular and plural and going on.
8 I am building a ladder of listening
I was listening for Ms. Lucille. And in that listening I was lucky to be in conversation with several writers. Such exchanges added to my thinking, especially an early conversation with Sidney Clifton about desire in her mother’s poems. Desire led me to “water sign woman” and to the waiting, knowing, and feeling there.
9
I walked awake and differently attentive to the bridge between Clifton’s poems and the lives of those around me. Just days after coming to How to Carry Water as the title, for example, I sat reading the big, black Collected in the café below my apartment. The young waiter saw the book and said, Oh my god! I love Lucille Clifton’s poetry! He talked about “homage to my hips” and how she talks about things he didn’t think of as being in poems. Before leaving I said it was so nice to meet him and asked him his name. He said, River. And I thought, Of course!
I listened to the songs that Ms. Lucille’s daughters told me she loved, among them: Ray Charles’ “Georgia On My Mind,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” “Born to Lose,” and “America the Beautiful.” Aretha’s Aretha Arrives and Aretha’s Gold. The songs of Joe Cocker, Dionne Warwick, Nina Simone. Creedence Clearwater Revival singing I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain …
10 a ladder of listening
When I asked Sonia Sanchez about what she hoped for this Selected, she spoke about an old-fashioned smile that people sometimes get when they hear Lucille Clifton’s name. She said, in a way that infused each word with a sense of looking forward and looking back: “I want Lucille to be seen, not an old-fashioned smile.” And she spoke about how difficult so many of Clifton’s poems are, especially the poems about her father sexually abusing her. She spoke of how political her poems, and how discomforting and fierce that work. And what that took.
She said resoundingly: “This was a brilliant woman.”
11
… and I turn in my chair and arch my back and make this sound for my two mothers and for all Dahomey women.
12
Come back. It is the “Come back” of Toni Morrison’s letter that I keep hearing. It was written in 1973 but catches so sharply still, in the light. And yet this is also true:
in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.
—aracelis girmay
Brooklyn, NY
2020
How to Carry Water
5/23/67
R.I.P.
The house that is on fire
pieces all across the sky
make the moon look like
a yellow man in a veil
watching the troubled people
running and crying
Oh who gone remember now like it was,
Langston gone.
■
SPRING THOUGHT FOR THELMA
Someone who had her fingers
set for growing,
settles into garden.
If old desires linger
she will be going
flower soon. Pardon
her little blooms
whose blossoming was stunted
by rooms.
■
Everytime i talk about
the old folks
tomming and easying their way
happy with their nothing and
grateful for their sometime
i run up against my old black
Mama
and i shut up and stand there
shamed.
■
a poem written for many moynihans
ignoring me
you turn into blind alleys
follow them around
to your boyhouse
meet your mother
green in her garden
kiss what she holds out to you
her widowed arm and
this is betterness
ignoring me
you make a brother for you
she drops him in the pattern
you made when you were sonning
you name her wife to keep her
and this is betterness
ignoring me
your days slide into seasons
you build a hole to fall in
and send your brother running
following blind alleys
turning white as winter
and this is
betterness
■
the poet is thirty two
she has such knowledges as
rats have,
the sound of cat
the smell of cheese
where the holes are,
she is comfortable
hugging the walls
she trembles over herself
in the light
and she will leave disaster
when she can.
■
take somebody like me
who Daddy took to sunday school
and who was a member of the choir
and helped with the little kids at
the church picnic,
deep into Love thy Neighbor take
somebody like me
who cried at the March on Washington
and thought Pennsylvania was beautiful
let her read a lot
let her notice things
then
hit her with the Draft Riots and the
burning of the colored orphan asylum
and the children in the church and
the Lamar busses and
the assassinations and the
bombs and all the spittings on our
children and
these beasts were not niggers
these beasts were not niggers
she
will be too old to change and
she will not hate consistently or long
and she will know herself a coward and
a fool.
■
my mama moved among the days
like a dreamwalker in a field;
seemed like what she touched was hers
seemed like what touched her couldn’t hold,
she got us almost through the high grass
then seemed like she turned around and ran
right back in
right back on in
■
miss rosie
when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut
