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Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name.
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WADE IN THE WATER
ALSO BY TRACY K. SMITH
Poetry
The Body’s Question
Duende
Life on Mars
Memoir
Ordinary Light
WADE IN THE WATER
POEMS
TRACY K. SMITH
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-55597-813-6
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-863-1
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2018
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951515
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art: Jie Zhao / Corbis News / Getty Images
for Tina
CONTENTS
I.
Garden of Eden
The Angels
Hill Country
Deadly
A Man’s World
The World Is Your Beautiful Younger Sister
Realm of Shades
Driving to Ottawa
Wade in the Water
II.
Declaration
The Greatest Personal Privation
Unwritten
I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It
Ghazal
III.
The United States Welcomes You
New Road Station
Theatrical Improvisation
Unrest in Baton Rouge
Watershed
Political Poem
IV.
Eternity
Ash
Beatific
Charity
In Your Condition
4½
Dusk
Urban Youth
The Everlasting Self
Annunciation
Refuge
An Old Story
Notes
Acknowledgments
WADE IN THE WATER
I.
GARDEN OF EDEN
What a profound longing
I feel, just this very instant,
For the Garden of Eden
On Montague Street
Where I seldom shopped,
Usually only after therapy,
Elbow sore at the crook
From a handbasket filled
To capacity. The glossy pastries!
Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!
Once, a bag of black beluga
Lentils spilt a trail behind me
While I labored to find
A tea they refused to carry.
It was Brooklyn. My thirties.
Everyone I knew was living
The same desolate luxury,
Each ashamed of the same things:
Innocence and privacy. I’d lug
Home the paper bags, doing
Bank-balance math and counting days.
I’d squint into it, or close my eyes
And let it slam me in the face—
The known sun setting
On the dawning century.
THE ANGELS
Two slung themselves across chairs
Once in my motel room. Grizzled,
In leather biker gear. Emissaries
For something I needed to see.
I was worn down by an awful panic.
A wrenching in the gut, contortions.
They sat there at the table while I slept.
I could sense them, with a deck
Of playing cards between them.
To think of how they smelled, what
Comes to mind is rum and gasoline.
And when they spoke, though I couldn’t,
I dared not look, I glimpsed how one’s teeth
Were ground down almost to nubs.
Which makes me hope some might be
Straight up thugs, young, slim, raw,
Who bounce and roll with fearsome grace,
Whose very voices cause faint souls to quake.
—Quake, then, fools, and fall away!
—What God do you imagine we obey?
Think of the toil we must cost them,
One scaled perfectly to eternity.
And still, they come, telling us
Through the ages not to fear.
Just those two that once and never
Again for me since, though
There are—are there?—
Sightings, flashes, hints:
A proud tree in vivid sun, branches
Swaying in strong wind. Rain
Hurling itself at the roof. Boulders,
Mounds of earth mistaken for dead
Does, lions in crouch. A rust-stained pipe
Where a house once stood, which I
Take each time I pass it for an owl.
Bright whorl so dangerous and near.
My mother sat whispering with it
At the end of her life
While all the rooms of our house
Filled up with night.
HILL COUNTRY
He comes down from the hills, from
The craggy rock, the shrubs, the scrawny
Live oaks and dried-up junipers. Down
From the cloud-bellies and the bellies
Of hawks, from the caracaras stalking
Carcasses, from the clear, sun-smacked
Soundlessness that shrouds him. From the
Weathered bed of planks outside the cabin
Where he goes to be alone with his questions.
God comes down along the road with his
Windows unrolled so the twigs and hanging
Vines can slap and scrape against him in his jeep.
Down past the buck caught in the hog trap
That kicks and heaves, bloodied, blinded
By the whiff of its own death, which God—
Thank God—staves off. He downshifts,
Crosses the shallow trickle of river that only
Just last May scoured the side of the canyon
To rock. Gets out. Walks along the limestone
Bank. Castor beans. Cactus. Scat of last
Night’s coyotes. Down below the hilltops,
He squints out at shadow: tree bac
king tree.
Dark depth the eye glides across, not bothering
To decipher what it hides. A pair of dragonflies
Mate in flight. Tiny flowers throw frantic color
At his feet. If he tries—if he holds his mind
In place and wills it—he can almost believe
In something larger than himself rearranging
The air. He squints at the jeep glaring
In bright sun. Stares awhile at patterns
The tall branches cast onto the undersides
Of leaves. Then God climbs back into the cab,
Returning to everywhere.
DEADLY
The holy thinks Tiger,
Then watches the thing
Wriggle, divide, stagger up
Out of the sea to rise on legs
And tear into the side
Of a loping gazelle,
Thinks Man and witnesses
The armies of trees and
Every nation of beast and
The wide furious ocean
And the epochs of rock
A MAN’S WORLD
He will surely take it out when you’re alone
And let it dangle between you like a locket on a chain.
Like any world, it will flicker with lights that mean dwellings,
Traffic, a constellation of need. Tiny clouds will drag shadows
Across the plane. He’ll grin watching you squint, deciphering
Rivers, borders, bridges arcing up from rock. He’ll recite
Its history. How one empire swallowed another. How one
Civilization lasted 3,000 years with no word for eternity.
He’ll guide your hand through the layers of atmosphere,
Teach you to tamper with the weather. Swinging it
Gently back and forth, he’ll swear he’s never shown it
To anyone else before.
THE WORLD IS YOUR BEAUTIFUL YOUNGER SISTER
Seeing her as seldom as you do, it doesn’t change,
The ire, the shame, the fists you must remember
To smooth flat just thinking what they did,
What they promised, then took—those men
Who offered to pay, to keep, the clan of them
Lording it over the others like high school boys
And their kid brothers. Men with interests to protect,
And mute marble wives. Men who let her
Beam into their faces, watching her shoulders rise,
Her astonishing new breasts, making her believe
It was she who gave permission.
They plundered her youth, then moved on.
Those awful, awful men. The ones
Whose wealth is a kind of filth.
REALM OF SHADES
There was still a here, but that’s not where we were, continually turning our backs to something unseen, speaking with just our eyes, getting on with work. What was our work? Our doors wouldn’t lock. We rigged them, hung windows with sheets that broadcast our secrets after dark. People with weapons crept like thieves through their own houses. How did we feel? Like a canary cramped in a cage? Or the cat dying to know what the bird tastes like, swatting the rungs day after day, though the little hinged door never gives? No one hid. No one ran like a dog through the street. The moon traced its slow arc through the sky, drifting in and out of clouds that harbored nothing.
DRIVING TO OTTAWA
More and more now we slip
Into this tone of voice, the hush
Of people talking about someone
Who has just died, only
No one has died. We might be
Sisters, or old friends, or passengers
On the road to the airport. Once
I sat talking this way to a man
I’d only just met, while dawn
Floated up and turned all the white
Hills flush. The momentary kind
Of love two strangers share,
Pushing out those long sighs
And then rushing to fill the lungs
Again with weightless clear air.
Looking into the distance
Blotted out by hills that give way
Sometimes suddenly to silos
Or the teetering barns of a past
That’s gone, but won’t lie down
And let us grieve it.
The days
Are bright but cold. Our shadow
Spreads like ash across each road.
How much more will we bury
In the earth? How much
In this dark where the earth floats?
WADE IN THE WATER
for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters
One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring.
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—
O Miraculous Many Gone—
Is this love the trouble you promised?
II.
DECLARATION
He has
sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people
He has plundered our—
ravaged our—
destroyed the lives of our—
taking away our—
abolishing our most valuable—
and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for
Redress in the most humble terms:
Our repeated
Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration
and settlement here.
—taken Captive
on the high Seas
to bear—
THE GREATEST PERSONAL PRIVATION
The greatest personal privation I have had to endure has been the want of either Patience or Phoebe—tell them I am never, if life is spared us, to be without both of them again.
—letter from Mary Jones to Elizabeth Maxwell regarding two of her slaves, 30 August 1849
1.
It is a painful and harassing business
Belonging to her. We have had trouble enough,
Have no comfort or confidence in them,
And they appear unhappy themselves, no doubt
From the trouble they have occasioned.
They could dispose of the whole family
Without consulting us—Father, Mother,
Every good cook, washer, and seamstress
Subject to sale. I believe Good shall be
Glad if we may have hope of the loss of trouble.
I remain in glad conscience, at peace with God
And the world! I have prayed for those people
Man
y, many, very many times.
2.
Much as I should miss Mother,
I have had trouble enough
And wish no more to be
Only waiting to be sent
Home in peace with God.
3.
In every probability
We may yet discover
The whole country
Will not come back
From the sale of parent
And child. So far
As I can see, the loss
Is great and increasing.
I know they have desired
We should not know
What was for our own good,
But we cannot be all the cause
Of all that has been done.
4.
We wish to act. We may yet.
But we have to learn what their
Character and moral conduct
Will present. We have it in
Contemplation to wait and see.
If good, we shall be glad; if
Evil, then we must meet evil
As best we can.
5.
Father, mother, son, daughter, man.
And if that family is sold:
Please—
We cannot—
Please—
We have got to—
Please—
The children—
Mother and Father and husband and—
All of you—
All—
I have no more—
How soon and unexpectedly cut off
Many, many, very many times.
UNWRITTEN
Neither do I think it would at all promote the slave’s interest to liberate him in his present degraded state.
—letter from Mary Jones to Charles Colcock Jones, 24 November 1829
Much as I should miss the mother, I am
Persuaded that we might come
To some understanding about a change
Of investment. I do not wish
To influence you in the least degree
Beyond your own convictions, nor
To have you subjected to inconveniences