Elizabeth Alexander

Sylvia Plath is setting my hair on rollers made from orange-juice cans. The hairdo is shaped like a pyre. My locks are improbably long. A pyramid of lemons somehow balances on the rickety table where we sit, in the rented kitchen which smells of singed naps and bergamot. Sylvia Plath is surprisingly adept at rolling my unruly hair. She knows to pull it tight. Few words. Her flat, American belly, her breasts in a twin sweater set, stack of typed poems on her desk, envelopes stamped to go by the door, a freshly baked poppyseed cake, kitchen safety matches, black-eyed Susans in a cobalt jelly jar. She speaks a word, “immolate,” then a single sentence of prophecy. The hairdo done, the nursery tidy, the floor swept clean of burnt hair and bumblebee husks.

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.

According to Mister Hedges, the custodian who called upon their parents after young Otwiner and young Julia were spotted at the matinee of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik at the segregated Knickerbocker Theater in the uncommon Washington December of 1922, “Your young ladies were misrepresenting themselves today,” meaning, of course, that they were passing. After coffee and no cake were finished and Mister Hedges had buttoned his coat against the strange evening chill, choice words were had with Otwiner and Julia, shame upon the family, shame upon the race. How they’d longed to see Rudolph Valentino, who was swarthy like a Negro, like the finest Negro man. In The Sheik, they’d heard, he was turbaned, whisked damsels away in a desert cloud. They’d heard this from Lucille and Ella who’d put on their fine frocks and French, claiming to be “of foreign extraction” to sneak into the Knickerbocker Theater past the usher who knew their parents but did not know them. They’d heard this from Mignon and Doris who’d painted carmine bindis on their foreheads braided their black hair tight down the back, and huffed, “We’ll have to take this up with the Embassy” to the squinting ticket taker. Otwiner and Julia were tired of Oscar Michaux, tired of church, tired of responsibility, rectitude, posture, grooming, modulation, tired of homilies each way they turned, tired of colored right and wrong. They wanted to be whisked away. The morning after Mister Hedges’ visit the paperboy cried “Extra!” and Papas shrugged camel’s hair topcoats over pressed pajamas, and Mamas read aloud at the breakfast table, “No Colored Killed When Roof Caves In” at the Knickerbocker Theater at the evening show from a surfeit of snow on the roof. One hundred others dead. It appeared that God had spoken. There was no school that day, no movies for months after.

“Southern Tradition of Eating Dirt Shows Signs of Waning” —headline, New York Times , 2/14/84 tra dition wanes I read from North ern South: D.C. Never ate dirt but I lay on Great- grandma’s grave when I was small. “Most cultures have passed through a phase of earth- eating most pre valent today among rural Southern black women.” Geo phagy

I am the last woman off of the plane that has crashed in a cornfield near Philly, picking through hot metal for my rucksack and diaper bag. No black box, no fuselage, just sistergirl pilot wiping soot from her eyes, happy to be alive. Her dreadlocks will hold the smoke for weeks. All the white passengers bailed out before impact, so certain a sister couldn’t navigate the crash. O gender. O race. O ye of little faith. Here we are in the cornfield, bruised and dirty but alive. I invite sistergirl pilot home for dinner at my parents’, for my mother’s roast chicken with gravy and rice, to celebrate.

My mother loves butter more than I do, more than anyone. She pulls chunks off the stick and eats it plain, explaining cream spun around into butter! Growing up we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles, butter melting in small pools in the hearts of Yorkshire puddings, butter better than gravy staining white rice yellow, butter glazing corn in slipping squares, butter the lava in white volcanoes of hominy grits, butter softening in a white bowl to be creamed with white sugar, butter disappearing into whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple, butter melted and curdy to pour over pancakes, butter licked off the plate with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture the good old days I am grinning greasy with my brother, having watched the tiger chase his tail and turn to butter. We are Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite historical revision, despite our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window, open to ask directions. I was always asking directions and always driving: to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror. The floors of my apartment would never come clean. Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp, smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke. What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar. Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre. Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head. I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg. No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.

Looking at the photograph is somehow not unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray screen for the virus, which I imagine as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine with serrated fins and a neon spine. I’m on a train, thinking about my friends and watching two women talk in sign language. I feel the energy and heft their talk generates, the weight of their words in the air the same heft as your presence in this picture, boys, the volume of late summer air at the beach. Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers? There is sun under your skin like the gold Sula found beneath Ajax’s black. I calibrate the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight of your elbow, Melvin, on Darrell’s brown shoulder.

Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves (though Sterling Brown said “Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”), digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook. Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love, and I’m sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?

We pull off to a road shack in Massachusetts to watch men walk on the moon. We did the same thing for three two one blast off, and now we watch the same men bounce in and out of craters. I want a Coke and a hamburger. Because the men are walking on the moon which is now irrefutably not green, not cheese, not a shiny dime floating in a cold blue, the way I'd thought, the road shack people don't notice we are a black family not from there, the way it mostly goes. This talking through static, bounces in space- boots, tethered to cords is much stranger, stranger even than we are.