Clifton: An Endless Gesture Toward Mercy

The poems in Mercy contain incredible range, but range is the wrong word. They explore and expand on a plethora of topics, but the poems do not seek to contain the subject matter. Instead, I see a building of ideas, of what mercy may or may one day mean.  The poems do not arrive at a conclusion, or any sort of finality; they do end, but they also seem to continue somewhere off the page. And I cannot help but think of these poems as an unending gesture toward mercy.

As a book Mercy leaves us with a sense of expansion and enormity. We, like the speaker, are left grasping for understanding and yes, for mercy too.  I see this expansion in much of Clifton’s work in the collection, but the endless reaching in “Wind on The St. Mary’s River” is particularly striking.

            it is the elders trying to return

            sensing that the coast is near and they

will soon be home again

they have walked under two oceans

and to many seas

the nap of their silver hair whipping

as the wind sings out to them

this way          this way

and they come rising steadily not

swimming exactly toward shore

toward redemption

but the wind dies down

and they sigh and still and descend

while we watch from our porches

not remembering their names not  calling out

Jeremiah        Fanny Lou      Geronimo but only

white caps on the water       look white caps

In contrast to the first two stanzas that establish the idea of crossing numbered bodies of water the last two stanza’s and the final line push the poem in to a place of expansion.  In the last two stanzas the elders become linked with the water and wind. They have become part of elemental bodies. Rather than a singular journey the crossing, like many of Clifton’s poems, has become endless and beyond the scope of a single life.  There is no ending, but a sense that like the rhythm and cycle of waves the elders will always be moving toward shore. And that the “we” in the poem will always be watching and reaching. It is this same expansive push in the poem where the concept of not remembering becomes linked to remembering. The names have been remembered on the page, but without context and between spaces. Here again, there is a reaching in between memory and loss into expansiveness. The last line signals the end of the text, but not the poem—not the complexity of what has been lost. Instead, the expectation of redemption and the transformation of reaching as a gesture becomes an endless space just as it does in the final lines of the book from “Message From The Old Ones:”

there is a star

more distant

than Eden

something there

is even now

preparing

Mercy moves in cycles from death to forgiveness and anger to hope and life then around again. It plunges into vast concepts, memories and contradictions without remorse or over explanation. The poems embody and endless gesture toward mercy that is never perfect or complete, but unyielding in the expansiveness of the search.