The End of the Alphabet Read online

  The End of the Alphabet

  The End of the Alphabet

  Claudia Rankine

  Copyright © 1998 by Claudia Rankine

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  Rankine, Claudia, 1963–

  The end of the alphabet / Claudia Rankine.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9853-2

  I. Title.

  PS3568.A572E536 1998

  811’.54—dc21 98-24717

  CIP

  Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of the following journals in which a number of these poems, sometimes in a different form, first appeared: Boston Review, The Marlboro Review, The Mississippi Review, PEQUOD, and The Southern Review.

  Many thanks to my dear friends who read and commented on these poems. Especially to Mary Jo Bang. And Sophie Cabot Black, Mark Rudman, Maggie Winslow, and Mark Wunderlich. Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown, merci. My gratitude to Richard Howard.

  Special thanks also to the MacDowell Colony.

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  for John Peter Lucas

  Contents

  Overview is a place

  Elsewhere, things tend

  Testimonial

  Toward biography

  Hunger to the table

  Extent and root of

  Residual in the hour

  Dirtied up

  Where is the sea?

  Cast away moan

  In this sense, beyond

  The quotidian

  There is a lot of talking going on

  masked in retelling because the feeling forgiven is too much.

  The End of the Alphabet

  Overview is a place

  *

  Difficult to pinpoint

  fear of self, uncoiled.

  specter unstrung. staggering stampede. Which

  sung? left the body open for the moon to break into,

  unspooling disadvantage.

  Give a thought, Jane: Did filth

  begin in conversation? drag

  the mood through before escaping the ugliness. Not to

  dwell on but overhear footsteps again

  approaching: immured,

  not immune, then dumdum

  bullet templed. rip the mind out. go ahead.

  *

  Dawn will clear though the night rains so hard. Rain

  and Jane mix and mixing up, thinking shore but hugging floor.

  What Jane must substitute for this year’s substitute

  for a mind intact? fire?

  its greediness egged on, flame after flame

  uninvolved

  but still fueling the shifting onslaught.

  Gray Jane

  emphasize otherwise, not the eyes

  but the cheek to the pillow. Bundle up and sweep

  bare the mind. Land its ooze

  at some other gate, soften

  dead wood. Sea smoke, drizzle, distance. The moment

  of elucidation snipped its tongue, its mouth water

  dried out—

  thought-damaged throat.

  *

  Remember a future

  from another dream

  and hold on. open your mouth

  close to your ear: fear

  in sanity lives. anatomy

  as dissonance,

  vertebral breaking. In spite

  of yourself.

  rising, the mercury

  reaching out

  to fever. fire. all your civilized

  sense, Jane. disabled.

  *

  Assurance collapses naturally

  as if each word were a dozen rare birds

  flown away. And gone

  elsewhere is their guaranteed landing

  though the orphaned wish

  to be happy was never withdrawn.

  Do not face assault uncoiled as loss,

  as something turned down: request or sheet. Pray

  to the dear earth, Jane, always freshly turned,

  pull the covers overhead and give

  and take the easier piece.

  to piece the mind.

  to gather on tiptoe. Having lost

  somewhere, without a name to call, help

  yourself. all I want.

  Elsewhere, things tend

  *

  Viewed in this way,

  … her voice

  at any distance cannot be

  heavier than her eyes. Listen, among the missing

  is what interrupts, stops her short

  far from here in ways that break to splinter.

  Until the sense that put her here is forced

  to look

  before remembering the towel that wiped sweat

  and wet face and dust from each mirror:

  she cleans her glasses with that. So in the end

  is this defeat?

  She thinks in it we are

  as washed-out road, as burnt-down, ash.

  Dismiss the air and after her gesture, there,

  the thrown off—

  *

  This then is—

  It remains as dusk with the hour, feeling looted

  in the body

  though every shadow is accounted for.

  Who to tell, I am nothing and without you,

  when good comes, every hand in greeting. There is

  no reasoning with need.

  I coach myself, speak to my open mouth,

  but whatever abandons, whatever leaves me sick,

  a rock in each hand, on the shoulder of some road,

  its nights unmediated, its dogs expected,

  knows its nakedness unseduced:

  (cruelty that stays, cut loose

  —its voice keeps on,

  meaning empty, the mood reproachful, faint. Don’t think.

  Don’t argue. Surfaced again: This

  plummeting, pulled back, sudden no—

  which cannot be given up as though one never hears back,

  as though all the seats are taken. This

  —drawn out of bounds

  without advantage and knowing, my God, what is probable is

  this coming to the end, not desperate for, not enraged.

  At first, embarrassed, lumbering beneath the formal poses,

  the well-cuffed, the combed hairs, the could-not-be-faulted

  statement of ease, though utterly

  and depleted, closing the door behind, for in

  this, the distance—wanting and the body losing, all the time

  losing, beforehand, inside.

  *

  Similar also,

  each gesture offering a hand to the atmosphere, like a wave,

  until it’s realized the one I’m waving to can’t see me anymore.

  Or is it my back turned? Me who leaves?

  If I remind myself all of us weep, wake, whisper

  in the same dark, and the sudden footfall or the longer silence

  separates us beyond each locked door, I am returned

  only to my o
wn. And am reluctant to complain as if

  exaggerated is the high water, as if it didn’t swallow thousands,

  these fossils, this bone, as if between us are not many

  extremes: the taste of blood in our mouths though the blows

  are seldom physical. What I wish to communicate is that

  it can be too late: this life offering sorrow as voice, leaving

  nothing to shadow. I want to say, a life can take a life away.

  Testimonial

  *

  As if I craved error, as if love were ahistorical,

  I came to live in a country not at first my own

  and here came to love a man not stopped by reticence.

  And because it seemed right

  love of this man would look like freedom,

  the lone expanse of his back

  would be found land, I turned,

  as a brown field turns, suddenly grown green,

  for this was the marriage waited for: the man

  desiring as I, movement toward mindful and yet.

  It was June, brilliant. The sun higher than God.

  *

  In this bed, a man on his back, his eyes graying blue.

  It is hurricane season. Sparrows flying in, out the wind.

  His lips receiving. He is a shore. The Atlantic rushing.

  Clouds opening in the late June storm. This,

  as before, in the embrace that takes all my heart.

  Imagine his unshaven face, his untrimmed nails, as all

  the hurt this world could give.

  *

  Gnaw. Zigzag. The end of the alphabet buckling floors.

  How to come up?

  The blue-crown motmot cannot negotiate narrow branches,

  but then her wings give way, betray struggle,

  intention broken off in puffy cumulus.

  I wished him inside again.

  Touched him. Feathery

  was the refusal,

  drawing together what thirsts. His whole self holding me in,

  we slept on the edge of overrunning

  * * *

  with parakeets nesting

  in porch lights and dying hibiscus covering the ground.

  (a dry season choked in dust, etched cracks in dirt roads,

  children down from the hills in the sweat of night

  to steal water.

  Plastic containers in those hands,

  over the gate to my house. I lie here, my head

  on the prime minister’s belly, listening: urgency

  swallowed by worried stillness

  enveloped again by movement, before, finally,

  the outside tap turns tentatively on—

  *

  Lower the lids and the mind swims out into

  what is not madness, and still the body

  feels small

  against such flooding hurled through the dull and certain dawn.

  You, you are defeat composed.

  The atmosphere crippled brings you to your knees. You are

  again where we find ourselves dragged.

  Your hand, that vagary in shadow.

  So soon you were distanced from error. Nakedness

  boiled down to gray days: hair in the drain, dead skin

  dunning shower water. The morning cannot

  be picked through, not be sorted out. Clearly, you know,

  so say, This earth untouched is ruptured enough to grieve.

  Toward biography

  *

  Who distributes the live or die

  after juice is refused, the egg is fried?

  Faced with its staggering number of runny noses

  the day begins, begins again, talks above

  the motor left running.

  Then I pay what I am asked to pay

  to enter the kiss,

  the low bow

  that does not touch the forehead to a scatter of needles

  because the dove never comes

  when the distance from wreckage to shore

  is rimmed with yearning

  suggesting once upon a time, our addiction to telling,

  is all effort to shape what surfaces within the sane.

  *

  Ignore your own devastation and it doggedly shadows, resurfacing

  across the first version, the flat world, forcing you within

  the real conversation you hold with yourself.

  If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this?

  Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.

  Or milk on the tongue tasted rude, unfortunate. And hunger

  awoke as human. On all sides, riddled. Broken

  and broke against. Inside, by earlier years, shook.

  I am remembering the hours lived in, steep steps

  angled, and the going up and down burdened before

  the certain hand went out, pushed—

  if only—

  or to go again, doing nothing

  to stop hurt releasing a body out. We live through, survive

  without regard for the self. Forgiving

  each day insisting it be forgiven, thinking

  our lives umbilical, tied up with living with how far

  we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner.

  *

  Inconsolable outdoorness of the heart

  and the self—not to bridge that—with limbs vexed,

  irises fretting the skinniest of hopes, out of wall cracks, upended

  intestines, these organs, this imageless throat, much more than mud

  locked together, microscopic genes, freezing surface of spleen,

  crush of leaves beneath until the fragmented shadow

  readjusts, until who I am differs. Then to pray from this body,

  waiting—Dear, heart, you break in two. You do not break into.

  *

  Privately,

  dukes up, duel or duck, beat on,

  or laughter: swollen, leaking in

  to appeal, To die.

  For in the hysteria, craven.

  To the life loved: I have given

  my hand, my word:

  solemn, the oath. And yet, still here, I am

  cringing into

  or tipped in the bone: no cushion here.

  And the next minute with no clear word to speak

  and sore-shouldered,

  feeling foolishly subdued,

  I do not say (not yet,

  not quite), Reasoned out—Telephoned,

  I’ll meet the party: dulcet is the Dubonnet

  and yet the face cannot turn to turn the blind eye,

  so monstrous is the stretch

  across this cloudy spot on the cornea.

  The resolution: to outride, outride: (what

  the blues pull in. And in,

  I don’t know, I arrived unprepared for the lobed, dark-

  grayed matter of “wearisome” and cannot weep

  so cannot wake scaled-back,

  calm, outside the mirror.

  *

  as if anguishing should be excrement:

  a flabby stink unbandaged

  left out overnight:

  as if anguishing should be

  seeping intrusion hacked into:

  as if anguishing:

  *

  The plunging. This time complex

  neckline. This time phlegmatic

  clavicle unburied—

  which is a complicated situation.

  His bibulous baby pulls her knees in.

  When she gets to be happy

  she is happy, but every smile this time

  is a transaction—

  fluey, bluesy, she is, she isn’t.

  Any other night he would have

  wanted to bed her, his red carpet runaway,

  his simper silly—

  black mascaraed down to her ankle,

  unavailable tonight,

  * * *

  over the counter comes (win
k wink)

  points of upturned lip. crow’s-feet

  embellishing the split eye.

  roll away the nonsense. crumple.

  cancel the flaming hoop.

  feel sorry don’t.

  take out the bathwater (slippery

  the floor). sit down the long while.

  *

  (mosquitoes abundant. limit of white wall. stray thread. this tendency to worsen. the lowest throw at dice. the smallest amount. no subtleties. no who calls through the door. far from. skin enclosing. low-slung treachery. threat of. giving thirst back to the table. drawn breath holding. the shut eye.

  peekaboo—

  A she collapsing. some possible. some coherence unfastened.

  nothing acceptable. nothing stitched together:

  one mind but that mind cannot—

  ______________as if the world, extrinsic,

  were methodically the wrong fountain, the one where water

  is stagnant, the drainage blocked by nature’s things: leaves,

  moss, dirt the wind put here:

  I apologize, but I do not apologize.

  *

  (to sit next to the self.

  to wait. the chair next to the bed.

  to wait. and not for this.

  to wait. so, naturally

  in some wish working the way a grin does, stupidly

  sweet.

  in the before. the after. and before. October, a dull red.

  on the way to. a morning’s incoherence. all teeth and gum.

  as the smell of fire lingers without warmth. the fact imprisoned

  in wrong mind.

  in plain sight. circling the light like moths. like ashes.

  to wait. in the way of.

  to wait. either way. waiting.

  * * *

  And like the ones who can see what the day sees

  but cannot hold its vision in destiny, I understand

  and the agility to understand makes no difference: