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“Arrival is freedom as colorful as the lights at night saying I never want to leave my memories.”
--Mural line from Community-Poem by 4th graders at P.S. 19, Lower East Side, NY
Arrival is freedom as colorful as the lights at night.
I used to think that I was the only one who could see
The stars shimmering riot outside my window, stars nervy
enough to compete with the stuttering neon of the Chinese eatery
and the flares that went up constantly in my own imagination.
Mama, my stars are here, I’d say, MY stars,
and though they didn’t splash my room with quite enough light,
I heralded their arrival by grabbing a notebook, a battered Bic,
and writing until I got dizzy from trying to stuff whole worlds
into the stingy space of a college-ruled line, until the stars
said goodnight little girl, it’s much too late and it hurts
to watch how hard you dream.
One night, I filled whole page with a single word-
anemone. Over and over, the ens and m
straining to Stern Palmer Method hilltops, never beyond
the sky’s thin blue line. Anemone. Anemone.
My life tipped and tumbled the day Ms. Stein, my 4th
grade teacher, chalked that word on the board and said
Who can pronounce this? I took a stab and caught it, and
that one word was uncanny butter on my new tongue,
it kept coming back to my mouth, the very first sound
I wanted to own, to name myself after, I wanted no one
else to ever utter this, listen, even now listen to how the word
circles, turns round and surprises itself. I was nine.
I wanted to live my little life just like that.
That day I gave the word a home just under my breath
and constantly drew on the drug of it, serving anemone
up to the open air, all this before I even knew what it meant.
If you never remember feeling that way about a single word,
finding fire in the sheer power of the sound of it,
throw all your poetry away.
Or lift it up and see that it is resting on nothing.
We who are approaching fifty tire of being so desperately elegant,
So necessarily knowledgeable about the many ways the path rumbles
as it heads toward death. Yes, laughter is the best medicine.
Yes, sex after 40 is so good it’s otherworldly and can permanently
cross your eyes if you’re not careful. But know this:
Your greatest secrets are behind you.
I never want to leave my memories.
I hold that lostago notebook in my hand and stare
at those few pages and I want to be what I was then,
gangly and pigeon-toed and starch stiff pinafore,
my ears crisscross scarred from Saturday morning head pressings.
I want to be nine again,
when I wasn’t afraid of anything but long division and the sentence
Go pull me off a switch, when Karen Ford and I pulled our panties
down and wriggled up against each other to see what all the fuss
was about, and I never ever wrote about the fire down there, the fire
that time. Nine was when I cried because it would take so long to grow up
And Smokey Robinson would be gone by the time I grew the hips
I needed to rock his world. I wrote myself tall and long-haired,
I wrote myself heroic, I wrote myself white, Cherokee, cheerleader,
distressed damsel in Alan Ladd’s arms, I wrote myself angelic,
I wrote myself bitch, I wrote stories where I was always the star,
I wrote the word anemone over and over in fading ink, the loops
and hilltops perfect. When I was nine, I knew for
a fact that I could whip the world upright with a Bic pen
and any kind of paper, that the stars would always
flood my soul with just enough light.
In 1964, words were everywhere, words that were
new and hadn’t been said before. Every Sunday my
mama prodded me every to stand up in the middle of the sweat of
Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist church and testify to a salvation that
had, so far, eluded me, at least in that born-again-holy-ghost-filling-
my-shoes-with-the-news kinda sense. Just once I wish I
had had the nerve to tell the truth about what actually did save me:
Giving Glory to God, Rev. Thomas, the deacons and elders and the congregation:
I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HE IS A DICTIONARY.
One white-hot second of silence. Then, imagine the fainting, the eye-rolls.
The gospel today will be brought to you by the letter a. 1. the first letter of the English alphabet, a vowel. 2. any spoken sound represented by the letter a, as in pale, hat or small. 3. something having the shape of an a. 4. a written or printed representation of the letter a. 5. a device, as a printer’s type, for reproducing the letter a. 6. from a to z, from the beginning to the end.
Saying I never want to leave my memories
Saying I never want to leave my memories
Saying I never want my memories to leave
me
In my beginning, deep in my letter a, I walked streets
where the barbershops left their doors open,
and all manners of glorious bullshit spilled out,
charms and curses, all spritzed with that mango-scented oil
that makes black heads shimmer. Curses piled upon compliments,
my people razzing and razor sharp, snippets of songs
in the middle of sentences, spontaneous doo-wop
where any two lines came together to make a corner.
Sitting there next to my daddy, I was little woman
and sweet little crumbsnatcher, baby you a pretty one, won’t be long
before those boys start sniffing around. And I’d squeeze my eyes shut
and let the lies move me from ashy and too black
to a prettier place, such is the power of words.
I knew that these men would have a place in my stories,
crowns teetering on their just-shaved heads,
all there ain’t done beens and musta haves and done gone
for goods languaging the air of the next world I create,
I wrote of their bodies arcing over mine, of their kisses
on the top of my head, of their lifting me up off this earth
and whirling me ‘round till nothing made sense but the spin.
I wrote about how they wore heartbreak, in their eyes,
mad all morning at that whiskey bottle, in their talking
about women with both love and knives in their throats.
I was raised with every door open. Ms. Mamie liable to
pull me in and press my whole head without asking my mama,
just cause it was nappy and needed it. Then she’d fix me up
with a plate filled with the pungent inner workings of some cow
and okra fried slippery all of it splashed with Tabasco and Mr. Ellis
say if you will just run to the store for me baby, just need me some bread and matches,
give you a dime to buy yoself something, and the something you buy:
wax lips or pork rinds, Lemonheads or Red Hots, or a big fat sour pickle
with a peppermint stick shoved down its middle,
all those doors open and Fontella bass preaching outward,
novels one chapter at a time trapped in the jukebox. And come on
in here baby, always carrying that notebook, come on in here
and write me something pretty. Just remember, don’t let the boys
See you being all smart, they don’t like that. Get married first,
then write all the stuff you want. I spent so much time trying to
write Ms. Mamie’s face while Ms. Mamie was saying that.
All I could say was that she looked hungry for more time.
I was raised with every door open. Every two weeks a new Motown song,
and in my beginning, the words of those songs wrote us, slipped our scrawny 9-year-old bodies into sequined sheaths and lied to us about how long and how hard men would beg for what we imagined we had. Romance served up in neat in 4/4 time, only light skin and long hair need apply. And hiding in the crevice underneath my apartment building, the only white boy in the neighborhood would show us his curly little cock for a quarter. I wrote of this incident in code, fearing my mother’s wrath, misspelling the state of his fingers.
I never want to leave my memories. They arrive with hopeful fanfare
and they are freedom. They are in ink on yellowing pages.
And there, in the middle of everything, one word, stuttering its strength.
As colorful as the lights at night.
Anemone. Anemone.
So, students of PS 19, lower east side, NY,
when your stars come to your window,
what obsesses you? What thing pushes you to write about it,
pushes so hard that you can’t sleep
and eventually the stars give up and go away
because it hurts to see you dream so hard?
Do you write about raucous Saturday mornings
at the barbershop, the deceptions of music,
the nose wail of pork and Tabasco in a big woman’s kitchen?
Do you write just to see the sound of the first word
you wanted to own? Or, times being what they are,
do you write of dust covering everything,
and nightmares of falling from great heights?
Oh, you will grow older.
Your notebooks will be lost on subways, hidden from
new lovers, the poetry of your life will embarrass you.
You will claim not to need that way of breathing any longer,
you will begin to make money or lose it, the songs
you hear on the radio will be obsessed with booty and blunts
and will confound you. Oh, you will grow older.
On ATM receipts, on the backs of cocktail napkins,
you will begin to list revelations that all begin with the same two words:
I can’t
stop listening to blues songs where some checkertoothed growler
informs me that my heart is worthless or missing altogether.
I can’t unravel the mystery of me, and it’s growing late.
I can’t walk in a straight line without my hips wailing hallelujah.
I can’t stop dancing like a colored girl with a lit match at her backside.
I can’t believe that I will be 50 before I am 40 again.
I can’t find anyone to jump doubledutch with me.
I can’t make my poems be happy. I have tried neon ink,
perfumed paper and writing naked under a silver-spilling moon.
I can’t hold my mother close long enough for her body to realize
how completely it once harbored mine.
I can’t say, even now, that a serpent tempted me. I was behind myself
and I pushed.
I can’t find the stars at night anymore.
I can’t hold onto all of my memories.
And I’ll can’t find it in myself to forgive you
PS 19 students, 4th lower east side, NY,
for writing that gorgeously cluttered line
and lighting that fire
and resurrecting that word
and lighting that fire
and resurrecting that word
and opening this door.
©2002, Patricia Smith
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