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Tending

- 1962-

In the pull-out bed with my brother
            in my grandfather’s Riverton apartment
my knees and ankles throbbed from growing,
            pulsing so hard they kept me awake—
or was it the Metro North train cars
            flying past the apartment, rocking the walls,
or was it the sound of apartment front doors
            as heavy as prison doors clanging shut?
Was the Black Nation whispering to me
            from the Jet magazines stacked on the floor, or
was it my brother’s unfamiliar ions
            vibrating, humming in his easeful sleep?
Tomorrow, as always, Grandfather will rise
            to the Spanish-Town cock’s crow deep in his head
and perform his usual ablutions,
            and prepare the apartment for the day,
and peel fruit for us, and prepare a hot meal
            that can take us anywhere, and onward.
Did sleep elude me because I could feel
            the heft of unuttered love in his tending
our small bodies, love a silent, mammoth thing
            that overwhelmed me, that kept me awake
as my growing bones did, growing larger
            than anything else I would know?

From Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 (Graywolf Press, 2010). Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Alexander. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.

More by Elizabeth Alexander

Blues

I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, 'til
my face is creased and swollen,
'til my lips are dry and hot. I 
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove 
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father's money.

To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worked hard to give you what you have.
There is no sin but sloth. Burn
to a wick and keep moving.

I avoided sleep for years,
up at night replaying 
evening news stories about
nearby jailbreaks, fat people
who ate fried chicken and woke up
dead. In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V's of birds flying in formation,
or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

Ladders

Filene's department store
near nineteen-fifty-three:
An Aunt Jemima floor
display. Red bandanna,

Apron holding white rolls
of black fat fast against
the bubbling pancakes, bowls
and bowls of pale batter.

This is what Donna sees,
across the "Cookwares" floor,
and hears "Donnessa?" Please,
This can not be my aunt.

Father's long-gone sister,
nineteen-fifty-three. "Girl?"
Had they lost her, missed her?
This is not the question.

This must not be my aunt.
Jemima? Pays the rent.
Family mirrors haunt
their own reflections.

Ladders. Sisters. Nieces.
As soon as a live Jemima
as a buck-eyed rhesus
monkey. Girl? Answer me.

Equinox

Now is the time of year when bees are wild 
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped 
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants 
in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. 
I have found their dried husks in my clothes. 

They are dervishes because they are dying, 
one last sting, a warm place to squeeze 
a drop of venom or of honey. 
After the stroke we thought would be her last 
my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped 

a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, 
walked outside, and lay down in the snow. 
Two years later there is no other way 
to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light 
as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

Related Poems

Fire Gotten Brighter

Remember that memory.
In this dimness when the sounds I make
are foreign, my home is not my own.
when I think of another winter
and the distant whiteness of its walls—
when even the sun seems set
outside the world. In this dimness
the edge of things removed
to thought the numb call touch,
remember that memory—
the young black self
the whole black body painted hot
by the fresh orange scene in the basement
of our old house when I was nine.
When it was my turn
to keep the fire going while my family slept —
my father off divorced somewhere, my older brother resting
after work, and what shadows hovered at the fringe of light
spilt from the furnace’s mouth—
I stuck my shovel in the flame,
had its intensity
its heat travel through a vein in the handle
to a part of my head.
The coals gotten smaller, brighter.
Out of that fire, my frightened shovelling in the night
now a framed power, that young effort
made a little orange scene
kept the whole world excited—
gathered near its center.

In this dimness where I can’t tell
if my longing is my own, it is gotten winter.
Above me I watch a jet
that be’s perfectly still, yet gets so distant,
goes so pointless. I could take a plane,
fly from here to somewhere small
till I’m ashes of myself—
but everything burns repeatedly
or keeps burning. Remember that memory.
I am dark with effort, back at my mother’s house
someone’s thinking of me, and old and smothered flame
gets waked, and it warms the gap
between image and real light.

Dear Beth

translated by Sasha Pimentel

The girls in Perth Amboy
add to the wind
their small tears
to loosen the torment.

I remember 
the first time
on these grounds,
the mailbox, the snow,
your coupon book,
English class,
the smell of neglect
in the hallways.

So,
Winter,
the liminal sickness
of sidewalks.
The cold
at the corners of lips,
above the machines,
the counter
and vital signs,

Cold
intervening
the deep root of rage,
sowing what is solid
into the lawn,
heightening the rose’s stem,
and from your own kindness.

But I think,
dear Beth,
it must be true
that before us
was another tribe of wanderers,
shepherds of loss

these girls
in Perth Amboy
shaking the bedsheet,
cursing the weather,
their many errands,
and climbing regularly
the erect hill
of ire,
our
daily goddess,
the first language
we learned here,
our great, unexpected possession.

I ask myself
dear Beth,
is this bright, 
hard, polished stone of rage
the land that we were promised?

 

Querida Beth

 

Las muchachas en Perth Amboy
agregan al viento
sus minúsculas lágrimas
para desatar la tormenta.

Recuerdo,
la primera vez de todo
en este predio:
el buzón, la nieve
tu libro de cupones
la clase de inglés,
el olor a desamparo
en los pasillos.

Entonces 
el Invierno,
la enfermedad liminal 
de las aceras.
El frío,
en la comisura de los labios,
arriba de las máquinas,
del mostrador
y de los signos vitales,

El frío 
interviniendo
La raíz profunda de la rabia,
sembrando lo sólido en la grama
arreciando el tallo de la rosa
y de tu propia bondad.

Pero pienso, 
querida Beth,
que debe ser cierto 
que antes de nosotras
hubo otra peregrina tribu 
pastora de la pérdida

esas muchachas 
en Perth Amboy
sacudiendo la sábana
desdiciendo del clima,
de sus muchos oficios 
y subiendo regularmente 
la colina erguida
de la ira,
nuestra 
diosa matutina, 
la primera lengua que 
aprendimos aquí, 
nuestra gran posesión inesperada.

Yo me pregunto
querida Beth 
¿es esta recia
lustrosa piedra pulida de la rabia 
la tierra que nos prometieron?

i know the grandmother one had hands

i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always in bowls
folding, pinching, rolling the dough
making the bread
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always under water
sifting rice
bluing clothes
starching lives
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always in the earth
planting seeds
removing weeds
growing knives
burying sons
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always under
the cloth
pushing it along
helping it birth into
skirt
dress
curtains to lock out
night
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always inside
the hair
parting
plaiting
twisting it into rainbows
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always inside
pockets
holding the knots
counting the twisted veins
holding onto herself
let her hands disappear
into sky
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always inside the clouds
poking holes for
the rain to fall.

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