Lucille Clifton

for some it is stone bare smooth as a buttock rounding into the crevasse of the world for some it is extravagant water   mouths wide washing together forever   for some it is fire for some air and for some certain only of the syllables it is the element they search their lives for eden for them it is a test

a poem in seven parts 1 convent my knees recall the pockets worn into the stone floor, my hands, tracing against the wall their original name, remember the cold brush of brick, and the smell of the brick powdery and wet and the light finding its way in through the high bars. and also the sisters singing at matins, their sweet music the voice of the universe at peace and the candles their light the light at the beginning of creation and the wonderful simplicity of prayer smooth along the wooden beads and certainly attended. 2 someone inside me remembers that my knees must be hidden away that my hair must be shorn so that vanity will not test me that my fingers are places of prayer and are holy that my body is promised to something more certain than myself 3 again born in the year of war on the day of perpetual help. come from the house of stillness through the soft gate of a silent mother. come to a betraying father. come to a husband who would one day rise and enter a holy house. come to wrestle with you again, passion, old disobedient friend, through the secular days and nights of another life. 4 trying to understand this life who did i fail, who did i cease to protect that i should wake each morning facing the cold north? perhaps there is a cart somewhere in history of children crying “sister save us” as she walks away. the woman walks into my dreams dragging her old habit. i turn from her, shivering, to begin another afternoon of rescue, rescue. 5 sinnerman horizontal one evening on the cold stone, my cross burning into my breast, did i dream through my veil of his fingers digging and is this the dream again, him, collarless over me, calling me back to the stones of this world and my own whispered hosanna? 6 karma the habit is heavy. you feel its weight pulling around your ankles for a hundred years. the broken vows hang against your breasts, each bead a word that beats you. even now to hear the words defend protect goodbye lost or alone is to be washed in sorrow. and in this life there is no retreat no sanctuary no whole abiding sister. 7 gloria mundi so knowing, what is known? that we carry our baggage in our cupped hands when we burst through the waters of our mother. that some are born and some are brought to the glory of this world. that it is more difficult than faith to serve only one calling one commitment one devotion in one life.

curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.

(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.) 1 invitation come coil with me here in creation’s bed among the twigs and ribbons of the past. i have grown old remembering the garden, the hum of the great cats moving into language, the sweet fume of the man’s rib as it rose up and began to walk. it was all glory then, the winged creatures leaping like angels, the oceans claiming their own. let us rest here a time like two old brothers who watched it happen and wondered what it meant. 2 how great Thou art listen. You are beyond even Your own understanding. that rib and rain and clay in all its pride, its unsteady dominion, is not what you believed You were, but it is what You are; in your own image as some lexicographer supposed. the face, both he and she, the odd ambition, the desire to reach beyond the stars is You. All You, all You the loneliness, the perfect imperfection. 3 as for myself less snake than angel less angel than man how come i to this serpent’s understanding? watching creation from a hood of leaves i have foreseen the evening of the world. as sure as she the breast of Yourself separated out and made to bear, as sure as her returning, i too am blessed with the one gift You cherish; to feel the living move in me and to be unafraid. 4 in my own defense what could I choose but to slide along behind them, they whose only sin was being their father’s children? as they stood with their backs to the garden, a new and terrible luster burning their eyes, only You could have called their ineffable names, only in their fever could they have failed to hear. 5 the road led from delight into delight. into the sharp edge of seasons, into the sweet puff of bread baking, the warm vale of sheet and sweat after love, the tinny newborn cry of calf and cormorant and humankind. and pain, of course, always there was some bleeding, but forbid me not my meditation on the outer world before the rest of it, before the bruising of his heel, my head, and so forth. 6 “the silence of God is God.” —Carolyn Forche tell me, tell us why in the confusion of a mountain of babies stacked like cordwood, of limbs walking away from each other, of tongues bitten through by the language of assault, tell me, tell us why You neither raised your hand Nor turned away, tell us why You watched the excommunication of That world and You said nothing. 7 still there is mercy, there is grace how otherwise could I have come to this marble spinning in space propelled by the great thumb of the universe? how otherwise could the two roads of this tongue converge into a single certitude? how otherwise could I, a sleek old traveler, curl one day safe and still beside YOU at Your feet, perhaps, but, amen, Yours. 8 “.........is God.” so. having no need to speak You sent Your tongue splintered into angels. even i, with my little piece of it have said too much. to ask You to explain is to deny You. before the word You were. You kiss my brother mouth. the rest is silence.

(at St. Mary's) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back     may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that