Some Poetry Sunday columns this month will reprise previous features of black women poets and poems that take up questions of social justice. We share the outrage and heartbreak over the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and other BIPOC and believe that that courageous dialogue about racial prejudice is critical to the survival of our culture and country. These poems remind us that poetry is a powerful vehicle for such a dialogue, and we will continue to make them a regular part of the Poetry Sunday series.
Some years there exists a wanting to escape…
Some years there exists a wanting to escape—
you, floating above your certain ache—
still the ache coexists.
Call that the immanent you—
You are you even before you
grow into understanding you
are not anyone, worthless,
not worth you.
Even as your own weight insists
you are here, fighting off
the weight of nonexistence.
And still this life parts your lids, you see
you seeing your extending hand
as a falling wave—
/
I they he she we you turn
only to discover
the encounter
to be alien to this place.
Wait.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
The opening, between you and you, occupied,
zoned for an encounter,
given the histories of you and you—
And always, who is this you?
The start of you, each day,
a presence already—
Hey you—
/
Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are
everywhere and you are nowhere in the day.
The outside comes in—
Then you, hey you—
Overheard in the moonlight.
Overcome in the moonlight.
Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you
hear this—what happens to you doesn’t belong to you,
only half concerns you He is speaking of the legionnaires
in Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail and you are pulled back
into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze—
The world out there insisting on this only half concerns
you. What happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half
concerns you. It’s not yours. Not yours only.
/
And still a world begins its furious erasure—
Who do you think you are, saying I to me?
You nothing.
You nobody.
You.
A body in the world drowns in it—
Hey you—
All our fevered history won’t instill insight,
won’t turn a body conscious,
won’t make that look
in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing
to solve
even as each moment is an answer.
/
Don’t say I if it means so little,
holds the little forming no one.
You are not sick, you are injured—
you ache for the rest of life.
How to care for the injured body,
the kind of body that can’t hold
the content it is living?
And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?
Even now your voice entangles this mouth
whose words are here as pulse, strumming
shut out, shut in, shut up—
You cannot say—
A body translates its you—
you there, hey you
/
even as it loses the location of its mouth.
When you lay your body in the body
entered as if skin and bone were public places,
when you lay your body in the body
entered as if you’re the ground you walk on,
you know no memory should live
in these memories
becoming the body of you.
You slow all existence down with your call
detectable only as sky. The night’s yawn
absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle
to the sun ready already to let go of your hand.
Wait with me
though the waiting, wait up,
might take until nothing whatsoever was done.
/
To be left, not alone, the only wish—
to call you out, to call out you.
Who shouted, you? You
shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes
sounding like you, you sometimes saying you,
go nowhere,
be no one but you first—
Nobody notices, only you’ve known,
you’re not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad—
It’s just this, you’re injured.
/
Everything shaded everything darkened everything
shadowed
is the stripped is the struck—
is the trace
is the aftertaste.
I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to
know whatever was done could also be done, was also
done, was never done—
The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much
to you—
Claudia Rankine, “Some years there exists a wanting to escape…” (pp. 139-146) from Citizen: An American Lyric. Copyright © 2014 by Claudia Rankine. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.
Citizen is available for order here.
Read the original 2/24/19 Poetry Sunday column featuring this poem here.
Listen to Rankine talking about Citizen here, and read essays about her work here. Interviews of Rankine about Citizen are here and here.
Read Rankine’s recent remarks about the George Floyd protests here.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, two plays including Provenance of Beauty, A South Bronx Travelogue, and numerous video collaborations. She is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Rankine’s book, Citizen, won the PEN Open Book Award, the PEN Literary Award, the NAACP Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (the first book ever to be a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in California and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. [Source here. ]
