How to Carry Water Read online

  a yellow man in a veil

  watching the troubled people

  running and crying

  Oh who gone remember now like it was,

  Langston gone.

  The poem—in its being at all—is an attempt to remember a community’s loss while simultaneously marking the impossibility of that record ever being precise enough. The decision to begin the Selected here carried a few hopes. I wanted to mark Clifton’s documentary sensibility and a strange, triple-eyed imagery where the moon, for example, looks like a yellow man in a veil, a mourner among mourners, but also watching, like, maybe, a poet. A poet like Langston, a poet like Ms. Lucille.

  5

  The Selected begins with “5/23/67 R.I.P.” and moves chronologically across the work ending with ten previously uncollected poems. Most of these poems my sister-poet Kamilah Aisha Moon and I came upon together while visiting Clifton’s papers at Emory. To see those poems whose margins were sometimes scribbled with the math of bills and the drawings of children, was to have yet another sense of the hours and breaths by which the poems were made. And to read across her revisions was to also sense the circuitry and pull of her own listening. In “Poem With Rhyme,” for example, she changes: “I have cried, me and my / possible yes …” to “I have cried, me and my / black yes …” This change from “possible” to “black” to me revealed a circuitry of association. For Clifton the lineage of “black” is a lineage of possibility.

  I revisited those poems again and again to see which, if any, might resonate with the other poems I’d already set aside for the Selected. A few of them, yes, seemed to utterly be a part and so I contacted the publisher and Clifton’s daughters. Now these are the last poems of the book. This said, it is not clear to me when these poems were written. I love that an otherwise chronological organization is troubled by these poems I cannot place in order or time definitively. This, too, seems essential and part of what her work offers. This, too, seems part of what I have been listening for.

  6

  In the archives I also found what I’d been looking for. I knew that Toni Morrison was Clifton’s editor at Random House when Clifton was writing Generations. I had been hoping to find correspondence between them about the writing, perhaps just as a way of hearing these wondrous and brilliant writers thinking together generally, but I also hoped to understand something about each of their poetics.

  In May of 1972, Toni Morrison writes to Lucille Clifton thanking her for agreeing to read stories by Toni Cade Bambara. She writes: “I think they are stunning—and hope you will too.” When Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love was published in 1972, Clifton’s words were published on the back: “She has captured it all, how we really talk… She must love us very much.” (So here we see that for Clifton, precision and love hold each other.) In November of 1973 Morrison again writes to Clifton, New York to Baltimore: “So good to meet you at last. I wish we had more time—I had just discovered what it was when the time was gone. Come back.”

  Later in the letter Morrison shares her notes on Clifton’s manuscript—questions about titles and diction, a suggestion to delete a last line here and a fourth verse there. In the margins of Morrison’s letter are Clifton’s handwritten marks, clear and to the point:

  2. a. I don’t agree. “precious” and “valuable” are different.

  b. I agree about Sunflowers, suggest we leave it out …

  c. I don’t agree.

  d. I agree. That fourth verse belongs in my memory not in the poem.

  e. I want/mean to say this. It needs saying. again.

  f. I don’t agree.

  g. I don’t agree.

  h. I agree.

  What do you think about what I think?

  Love to yourself and

  your boys,

  Lucille

  7

  water sign woman

  the woman who feels everything

  sits in her new house

  waiting for someone to come

  who knows how to carry water

  without spilling, who knows

  why the desert is sprinkled

  with salt, why tomorrow

  is such a long and ominous word.

  they say to the feel things woman

  that little she dreams is possible,

  that there is only so much

  joy to go around, only so much

  water. there are no questions

  for this, no arguments. she has

  to forget to remember the edge

  of the sea, they say, to forget …

  In “Uses of the Erotic” (1978) Audre Lorde writes: “There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” And later: “Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy.” In articulating the power of the erotic as, among other things, something by which we can gauge our feelings and sense of fulfillment, Lorde also articulates a relationship between the erotic and attention: “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.”

  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 out

  sitting, waiting for your mind

  like next week’s grocery

  i say

  when i watch you

  you wet brown bag of a woman

  who used to be the best looking gal in georgia

  used to be called the Georgia Rose

  i stand up

  through your destruction

  i stand up

  ■

  the 1st

  what i remember about that day

  is boxes stacked across the walk

  and couch springs curling through the air

  and drawers and tables balanced on the curb

  and us, hollering,

  leaping up and around

  happy to have a playground;

  nothing about the emptied rooms

  nothing about the emptied family

  ■

  running across to the lot

  in the middle of the cement days

  to watch the big boys trembling

  as the dice made poets of them

  if we remembered to despair

  i forget

  i forget

  while the streetlights were blooming

  and the sharp birdcall

  of the iceman and his son

  and the ointment of the ragman’s horse

  sang spring

  our fathers were dead and

  our brothers were dying

  ■

  if i stand in my window

  naked in my own house

  and press my breasts

  against my windowpane

  like black birds pushing against glass

  because i am somebody

  in a New Thing

  and if the man come to stop me

  in my own house

  naked in my own window

  saying i have offended him

  i have offended his

  Gods

  let him watch my black body

  push against my own glass

  let him discover self

  let him run naked through the streets

  crying

  praying in tongues

  ■

  for deLawd

  people say they have a hard time

  understanding how i

  go on about my business

  playing my ray charles

  hollering at the kids—

  seem like my afro

  cut off in some old image

  would show i got a long memory

  and i come from a line

  of black and going on women

  who got used to making it through murdered sons

  and who grief kept on pushing

  who fried chicken

  ironed

  swept off the back steps

  who grief kept

  for their still alive sons

  for their sons coming<
br />
  for their sons gone

  just pushing

  ■

  ca’line’s prayer

  i have got old

  in a desert country

  i am dry

  and black as drought

  don’t make water

  only acid

  even dogs won’t drink

  remember me from wydah

  remember the child

  running across dahomey

  black as ripe papaya

  juicy as sweet berries

  and set me in the rivers of your glory

  Ye Ma Jah

  ■

  generations

  people who are going to be

  in a few years

  bottoms of trees

  bear a responsibility to something

  besides people

  if it was only

  you and me

  sharing the consequences

  it would be different

  it would be just

  generations of men

  but

  this business of war

  these war kinds of things

  are erasing those natural

  obedient generations

  who ignored pride

  stood on no hind legs

  begged no water

  stole no bread

  did their own things

  and the generations of rice

  of coal

  of grasshoppers

  by their invisibility

  denounce us

  ■

  flowers

  here we are

  running with the weeds

  colors exaggerated

  pistils wild

  embarrassing the calm family flowers  oh

  here we are

  flourishing for the field

  and the name of the place

  is Love

  ■

  after kent state

  only to keep

  his little fear

  he kills his cities

  and his trees

  even his children  oh

  people

  white ways are

  the way of death

  come into the

  black

  and live

  ■

  being property once myself