All history is a negotiation
between familiarity and
strangeness.
—SIMON SCHAMA
Lord, Lord. No rest
for the wicked?
Most likely no
heating pads.
(Heat some gravy for the potatoes,
slice a little green pepper
into the pinto beans . . . )
Sometimes a body
just plain grieves.
“The situation is intolerable”
Intolerable: that civilized word.
Aren’t we civilized, too? Shoes shined,
each starched cuff unyielding,
each dovegray pleated trouser leg
a righteous sword advancing
onto the field of battle
in the name of the Lord . . .
Hush, now. Assay
the terrain: all around us dark
and the perimeter in flames,
but the stars—
tiny, missionary stars—
on high, serene, studding
the inky brow of heaven.
So what if we were born up a creek
and knocked flat with the paddle,
if we ain’t got a pot to piss in
and nowhere to put it if we did?
Our situation is intolerable, but what’s worse
is to sit here and do nothing.
As if, after High Street
and the left turn onto Exchange,
the view would veer onto
someplace fresh: Curaçao,
or a mosque adrift on a milk-fed pond.
But there’s just more cloud cover,
and germy air
condensing on the tinted glass,
and the little houses with
their fearful patches of yard
rushing into the flames.
Pull the cord a stop too soon, and
you’ll find yourself walking
a gauntlet of stares.
Daydream, and you’ll wake up
in the stale dark of a cinema,
Dallas playing its mistake over and over
until even that sad reel won’t stay
stuck—there’s still
Bobby and Malcolm and Memphis,
at every corner the same
scorched brick, darkened windows.
Make no mistake: There’s fire
back where you came from, too.
Pick any stop: You can ride
into the afternoon singing with strangers,
or rush home to the scotch
you’ve been pouring all day—
but where you sit is where you’ll be
Teeth.
Metallic. Lie-gapped.
Not a friendly shine
like the dime
cutting my palm
as I clutch the silver pole
to step up, up
(sweat gilding the dear lady’s
cheek)—these are big teeth,
teeth of the wolf
under Grandmother’s cap.
Not quite a grin.
Pay him to keep smiling
as the bright lady tumbles
head over tail
Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person. This is the second time since the Claudette Colbert [sic] case. . . . This must be stopped.
— BOYCOTT FLIER, DECEMBER 5, 1955
Menial twilight sweeps the storefronts along Lexington
as the shadows arrive to take their places
among the scourge of the earth. Here and there
a fickle brilliance—lightbulbs coming on
in each narrow residence, the golden wattage
of bleak interiors announcing Anyone home?
or I’m beat, bring me a beer.
Mostly I say to myself Still here. Lay
my keys on the table, pack the perishables away
before flipping the switch. I like the sugary
look of things in bad light—one drop of sweat
is all it would take to dissolve an armchair pillow
into brocade residue. Sometimes I wait until
it’s dark enough for my body to disappear;
then I know it’s time to start out for work.
Along the Avenue, the cabs start up, heading
toward midtown; neon stutters into ecstasy
as the male integers light up their smokes and let loose
a stream of brave talk: “Hey Mama” souring quickly to
“Your Mama” when there’s no answer—as if
the most injury they can do is insult the reason
you’re here at all, walking in your whites
down to the stop so you can make a living.
So ugly, so fat, so dumb, so greasy—
What do we have to do to make God love us?
Mama was a maid; my daddy mowed lawns like a boy,
and I’m the crazy girl off the bus, the one
who wrote in class she was going to be President.
I take the Number 6 bus to the Lex Ave train
and then I’m there all night, adjusting the sheets,
emptying the pans. And I don’t curse or spit
or kick and scratch like they say I did then.
I help those who can’t help themselves,
I do what needs to be done . . . and I sleep
whenever sleep comes down on me.
“I’m just a girl who people were mean to
on a bus. . . . I could have been anybody.”
— MARY WARE, NÉE SMITH
Can’t use no teenager, especially
no poor black trash,
no matter what her parents do
to keep up a living. Can’t use
anyone without sense enough
to bite their tongue.
It’s gotta be a woman,
someone of standing:
preferably shy, preferably married.
And she’s got to know
when the moment’s right.
Stay polite, though her shoulder’s
aching, bus driver
the same one threw her off
twelve years before.
Then all she’s got to do is
sit there, quiet, till
the next moment finds her—and only then
can she open her mouth to ask
Why do you push us around?
and his answer: I don’t know but
are under arrest.
She must sit there, and not smile
as they enter to carry her off;
she must know who to call
who will know whom else to call
to bail her out . . . and only then
can she stand up and exhale,
can she walk out the cell
and down the jail steps
into flashbulbs and
her employer’s white
arms—and go home,
and sit down in the seat
we have prepared for her.
How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.
That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.
Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.
How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
QE2. Transatlantic Crossing. Third Day.
Panel of gray silk. Liquefied ashes. Dingy percale tugged over
the vast dim earth—ill-fitting, softened by eons of tossing
and turning, unfurling its excesses, recalling its losses,
no seam for the mending, no selvage to catch and align
from where I sit and look out from this rose-colored armchair
along the gallery. I can hear the chime of the elevator,
the hush of trod carpet. Beyond the alcove, escorted widows
perfect a slow rumba. Couples linger by the cocktail piano,
enmeshed in their own delight as others stroll past,
pause to remark on the weather. Mist, calm seas.
This is a journey for those who simply wish to be
on the way—to lie back and be rocked for a while, dangled
between the silver spoon and golden gate. Even
I’m thrilled, who never learned to wait on a corner,
hunched in bad weather, or how many coins to send
clicking into the glass bowl. I can only imagine
what it’s like to climb the steel stairs and sit down, to feel
the weight of yourself sink into the moment of going home.
This is not the exalted fluorescence of the midnight route,
exhaustion sweetening the stops. There’s
no money here, just chips and signatures,
no neat dime or tarnished token, no exact change.
Here I float on the lap of existence. Each night
I put this body into its sleeve of dark water with no more
than a teardrop of ecstasy, a thimbleful of ache.
And that, friends, is the difference—
I can’t erase an ache I never had.
Not even my own grandmother would pity me;
instead she’d suck her teeth at the sorry sight
of some Negro actually looking for misery.
Well. I’d go home if I knew where to get off.
In the Lobby of the Warner Theatre,
Washington.D.C.
They’d positioned her—two attendants flanking the wheelchair-
at the foot of the golden escalator, just right
of the movie director who had cajoled her to come.
Elegant in a high-strung way, a-twitch in his tux,
he shoved half spectacles up the nonexistent
bridge of his nose. Not that he was using her
to push his film, but it was only right (wasn’t it?)
that she be wherever history was being made—after all,
she was the true inspiration, she was living history.
The audience descended in a cavalcade of murmuring
sequins. She waited. She knew how to abide,
to sit in cool contemplation of the expected.
She had learned to travel a crowd
bearing a smile we weren’t sure we could bear
to receive, it was so calm a suturing.
Scrolling earthward, buffed bronze
in the reflected glow, we couldn’t wait but leaned out
to catch a glimpse, and saw
that the smile was not practiced at all—
real delight bloomed there. She was curious;
she suffered our approach (the gush and coo,
the babbling, the director bending down
to meet the camera flash) until someone
tried to touch her, and then the attendants
pushed us back, gently. She nodded,
lifted a hand as if to console us
before letting it drop, slowly, to her lap.
Resting there. The idea of consolation
soothing us: her gesture
already become her touch,
like the history she made for us sitting there,
waiting for the moment to take her.
The Pond, Porch-View:
Six P.M., Early Spring
I sit, and sit, and will my thoughts
the way they used to wend
when thoughts were young
(i.e., accused of wandering).
The sunset ticks another notch
into the pressure treated rails
of the veranda. My heart, too,
has come down to earth;
I’ve missed the chance
to put things in reverse,
recapture childhood’s backseat
universe. Where I’m at now
is more like riding on a bus
through unfamiliar neighborhoods—
chair in recline, the view chopped square
and dimming quick. I know
I vowed I’d get off
somewhere grand; like that dear goose
come honking down
from Canada, I tried to end up
anyplace but here.