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  How to Carry Water

  Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton

  How to Carry Water

  Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton

  Edited by Aracelis Girmay

  american poets continuum series, no. 180

  BOA Editions, Ltd. ■ Rochester, NY ■ 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by The Estate of Lucille T. Clifton.

  Foreword copyright © 2020 by Aracelis Girmay.

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

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  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on for special individual acknowledgments.

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  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Clifton, Lucille, 1936-2010, author. | Girmay, Aracelis, editor.

  Title: How to carry water : selected poems of Lucille Clifton / edited by Aracelis Girmay.

  Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020. | Series: American poets continuum series ; no. 180 | Includes index. | Summary: “A series of poems drawn from various collections published throughout the 40-year career of American poet Lucille Clifton”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020019710 (print) | LCCN 2020019711 (ebook) | ISBN 9781950774142 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781950774159 (paperback) | ISBN 9781950774166 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.L45 H69 2020 (print) | LCC PS3553.L45 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019710

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019711

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

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  Contents

  foreword

  ■ from Early Uncollected Poems (1965–1969)

  5/23/67 R.I.P.

  SPRING THOUGHT FOR THELMA

  Everytime i talk about

  a poem written for many moynihans

  the poet is thirty two

  take somebody like me

  ■ from good times (1969)

  my mama moved among the days

  miss rosie

  the 1st

  running across to the lot

  if i stand in my window

  for deLawd

  ca’line’s prayer

  generations

  flowers

  ■ from good news about the earth (1972)

  after kent state

  being property once myself

  the lost baby poem

  apology

  lately

  listen children

  the news

  the bodies broken on

  song

  africa

  earth

  God send easter

  so close

  poem for my sisters

  ■ from Uncollected Poems (1973–1974)

  Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival

  ■ from an ordinary woman (1974)

  in salem

  salt

  new bones

  harriet

  roots

  to ms. ann

  last note to my girls

  a visit to gettysburg

  this morning

  the lesson of the falling leaves

  i am running into a new year

  turning

  my poem

  lucy one-eye

  if mama

  i was born in a hotel

  light

  cutting greens

  i went to the valley

  at last we killed the roaches

  in the evenings

  breaklight

  some dreams hang in the air

  the thirty eighth year

  ■ from Uncollected Poems (ca. 1975)

  Anniversary 5/10/74

  November 1, 1975

  “We Do Not Know Very Much About Lucille’s Inner Life”

  ■ from two-headed woman (1980)

  lucy and her girls

  i was born with twelve fingers

  what the mirror said

  there is a girl inside

  to merle

  august the 12th

  speaking of loss

  februrary 13, 1980

  new year

  sonora desert poem

  my friends

  i once knew a man

  the mystery that surely is present

  the astrologer predicts at mary’s birth

  a song of mary

  island mary

  mary  mary astonished by God

  the light that came to lucille clifton

  testament

  mother, i am mad

  to joan

  in populated air

  ■ from Next (1987)

  there

  this belief

  why some people be mad at me sometimes

  sorrow song

  atlantic is a sea of bones

  cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty

  the lost women

  my dream about the cows

  my dream about the second coming

  the death of thelma sayles

  the message of thelma sayles

  the death of joanne c.

  enter my mother

  leukemia as white rabbit

  chemotherapy

  the message of jo

  the death of fred clifton

  “i’m going back to my true identity”

  in white america

  shapeshifter poems

  ■ from quilting (1991)

  i am accused of tending to the past

  note to myself

  poem beginning in no and ending in yes

  slave cabin, sotterly plantation, maryland, 1989

  whose side are you on?

  shooting star

  this is for the mice that live

  man and wife

  poem in praise of menstruation

  the killing of the trees

  wild blessings

  somewhere

  when i stand around among poets

  water sign woman

  photograph

  december 7, 1989

  to my friend, jerina

  poem to my uterus

  to my last period

  the mother’s story

  as he was dying

  blessing the boats

  ■ from The Book of Light (1992)

  LIGHT<
br />
  june 20

  daughters

  sam

  thel

  11/10 again

  she lived

  won’t you celebrate with me

  it was a dream

  each morning i pull myself

  here yet be dragons

  the earth is a living thing

  move

  samson predicts from gaza the philadelphia fire

  if i should

  further note to clark

  begin here

  night vision

  fury

  cigarettes

  leda 1

  leda 2

  leda 3

  brothers

  ■ from Uncollected Poems (1993)

  hometown 1993

  ones like us

  ■ from The Terrible Stories (1996)

  telling our stories

  the coming of fox

  dear fox

  leaving fox

  a dream of foxes

  amazons

  lumpectomy eve

  1994

  hag riding

  rust

  shadows

  entering the south

  the mississippi river empties into the gulf

  old man river

  auction street

  memphis

  what comes after this

  blake

  evening and my dead once husband

  in the same week

  heaven

  lorena

  in the meantime

  ■ from Blessing the Boats (2000)

  the times

  dialysis

  libation

  jasper texas 1998

  alabama 9/15/63

  praise song

  august

  study the masters

  birthday 1999

  grief

  ■ from Mercy (2004)

  the gift

  out of body

  oh antic God

  april

  children

  surely i am able to write poems

  mulberry fields

  cancer

  in the mirror

  blood

  walking the blind dog

  hands

  wind on the st. marys river

  the tale the shepherds tell the sheep

  stop

  ■ from Voices (2008)

  aunt jemima

  cream of wheat

  sorrows

  this is what i know

  6/27/06

  ■ from Uncollected Poems (2006–2010)

  birth-day

  mother-tongue: the land of nod

  mother-tongue: we are dying

  ■ from Last Poems & Drafts (2006–2010)

  some points along some of the meridians

  new orleans

  after the children died she started bathing

  In the middle of the Eye

  ■ Previously Uncollected Poems

  All Praises

  bouquet

  sam, jr.

  MOTHER HERE IS MY CHILD

  Poem To My Yellow Coat

  Poem With Rhyme

  Rounding the curve near Ellicot City

  entering earth

  to black poets

  quartz lake, Alaska

  Index of Poems

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Editor

  Colophon

  foreword

  1

  No one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside it, I believe that inside the voices of many contemporary U.S. American poets are the poems of Lucille Clifton. There is the ferocity of her clear sight. There is the constellatory thinking where every thing is kin. The verbs of one body might also be the verbs of another seemingly disparate or distant body (her streetlights, for example, bloom). And all things have agency: as the speaker of “august the 12th” mourns a distant brother on his birthday, the speaker’s hair cries, too (“my hair / is crying for her brother”). The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder—bearing witness to joy and to struggle.

  Over the course of her life, Clifton wrote 13 collections of poems, a memoir (which she worked on with her editor for the book, Toni Morrison), and more than 16 children’s books written for African American children, including Some of the Days of Everett Anderson and Black BC’s. And in 1988 Clifton was the first writer to have two books of poetry nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. Those books were Next and good woman.

  Her works are explicitly historical and of a palpable present moment. The earliest of the poems in this Selected are written during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the nuclear age, ecological crises, and independent movements across Africa. As the poet Kevin Young writes in the afterword of the monumental Collected: “Both the poetry world and the world of the 1960s were in upheaval; the years from 1965 to 1969 saw the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the first human walking on the moon, all of which appear in the poems … The Black Arts movement, which Lucille Clifton found herself a part of and in many ways helped to forge, insisted on poems for and about black folks, establishing a black aesthetic based on varying ways of black speech, African structures, and political action.”

  Clifton’s first book, good times, was published when her children were ages 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Her daughters Sidney, Gillian, and Alexia remember their mother’s writing as part of their daily life: “As children, we watched our mother type on her old-fashioned typewriter at the dining room table. For us, this is what mothers did; and where they did it; create worlds, play games, and share meals in the same place. Her creating space was her sanctuary, and ours. So it is with her every word.” Such insistence on acknowledging all worlds in all spaces has emboldened and nourished so many of us otherwise encouraged to shutdown our truest circuitry. Instead, her poems pulse with the miracle of the porous and daily. Distilled yet capacious, her poems, like seeds, are miraculous vessels of past and future, of dense and elemental possibility. However large the story they carry, they are always scaled to the particular and resonant detail which amplifies the world at their center.

  2

  Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles on June 27, 1936. If someone happened to have looked up at the sky that day they would have seen what looked like a moon split in half, 57% of the surface of the moon visible from the earth. I love to think of this poet born with twelve-fingers under a moon half visible, half invisible to our eyes. This poet of one eye fixed and another wandering, feeling both ordinary and magic, standing astride at least two worlds, being born out of one Thelma (her mother) into the old and new bones of her own name. Of this naming she writes:

  light

  on my mother’s tongue

  breaks through her soft

  extravagant hip

  into life.

  lucille

  she calls the light,

  which was the name

  of the grandmother

  who waited by the crossroads

  in virginia

  and shot the whiteman off his horse,

  killing the killer of sons.

  light breaks from her life

  to her lives …

  mine already is

  an afrikan name.

  Her poem reveals an archive of, among other things, some of what African America does to English and some of what English does to African America. In the memoir Generations she writes this of her lineage:

  And Lucy was hanged. Was hanged, the lady whose name they gave me like a gift had her neck pulled up by a rope until the neck broke and I can see Mammy Ca’line standing straight as a soldier in green Virginia […] and I know that her child made no sound and I turn in my chair and arch my back and make this sound for my two mothers and for all Dahomey women
.

  Such repetitions of names and stories move across her work. Histories written in circles much like time and weather are recorded in the rings of a tree. It was toward such repetitions and echoes that I listened, and out of them I began to see the shape of this Selected of poems rendered with documentary, spiritual, and mystical sensibilities. Peter Conners, my editor and the publisher of BOA Editions, calls it “listening for Ms. Lucille.” I tried to listen so close I even dreamed of her voice one January morning. It seems not mine to keep but something I should share with you: You’re always whole, she said. Except when you’re dreaming you’re a quarter open.

  3

  I tried to walk back through the final selections open as I’d be in a dream, or toward that kind of openness anyway. I listened for what I understood to be repeated resonances and reckonings across her life—the power of words, the loss of her mother, the deaths of the beloveds, the poem as a way to wonder, wonder as a way to live. Abortions. Children. The magic of hands. The violations of hands. Environmental crises and the links between racial violence and the devastation of the environment. The terrible stories of the terrible things we do to one another. I listened and heard something mystical: “the light flaring/ behind what has been called / the world …” I listened for what was strange and mysterious and a quarter open. I listened for what was sharp, clear, and yet prismatic and complex. I heard her, again and again, claim her Ones as the ones in the ground without headstones, the ones ringing like black bells, Black people, Black women people, one called Alice. Clifton says:

  study the masters

  like my aunt timmie.

  it was her iron,

  or one like hers,

  that smoothed the sheets…

  Part of her brilliance is in her ability to name, with specificity, her kin, while also leaving an opening for those outside of the frame of her particular knowing. The words “like” and “or” anchor us in the concrete while pointing us to a knowledge still outside of the poem.

  4

  How to Carry Water begins with the poem “5/23/67 R.I.P.” Written in ‘67 it was not published until 2012, in The Collected. I give deep and abiding thanks to editors Kevin Young and Michael Glaser for the hours and devotion which brought that collection into the world, and out of which this Selected emerges.

  In “5/23/67 R.I.P.” Clifton mourns the loss of the Great Langston Hughes, writer, activist, and chronicler of Black Life. The poem, dated one day after his death, closes with a lament (“Oh who gone remember now like it was …”) but in the lines directly above I come to understand that his death also marks Clifton’s eye as she reads even the moon through the veil of her own mourning:

  make the moon look like