"... the only mercy is memory"

There's a cadence and singsong quality to Lucille Clifton's voice, so much that when she ruminates about death, race, mercy, America, 9/11, the phantom, the wizard of Oz, nature, family, mother, sister, brother, father, logos, Powell, the race riots, etc. etc., she sung me to sleep with her nuanced and alluring language. I had to put her book down throughout the weekend because of the power behind the brevity of her words. She is a powerful voice. I had to read her slowly and give her honor.

How Lucille organized her poetry collection first interested me, compelled me. Her poems in last words informed the way I looked at the rest of poems, and how she used lowercase formatted the sound in the poems as whispers of longing and memory, shifting the way I look at perceptions and mercy. Her poems feel so intimate, like I'm slipping into a conversation between two people who know each other deeply. One of my favorite poems from this section is dying:

i saw a small moon rise
from the breast of a woman
lying in a hospital hall
and I saw that the moon was me
and I saw that the punctured bag
of a woman body was me
and i saw you sad there in the lobby
waiting to visit and I wanted
to sing to you
go home
i am waiting for you there

The visceral experience from this poem was overwhelming, and the way she paints the scene with minimality introduces an outer-body experience, as if the exchanges between the small "i" and the big "I" represented watching one's own body in the feverish experience before death, like it's a dream. I thought of my grandmother in her hospital bed before she died. I thought of the moment I tearfully clung to her and apologized for the many things I had failed at. And Lucille's ability to capture that moment before death in a nuanced cadence was beauty to me. There's an unspeakable emotive language that occurs before death, and Lucille is able to thread that language out of the bones of her words. It's magical and dreamlike and alluring and painful, like a purging, like mercy.

My mother's name is Mercy. Her full name is Mercidita. I never say her name aloud, and I rarely speak about my biological, estranged mother besides to point out that she has transferred parts of her sadness to my body, like my grandmother did. Lucille forced me to confront these emotions, within the pangs of memory.

Her next section stories contained my favorite poems. the river between us, in the mirror, a story for edgar, mercy, here rests, after oz, the Phantom, Powell, hands, and stop. It's the way she writes about her subjects with veracity and verisimilitude, usurping the centre of knowledge by removing what's expected. In a story, her last stanza stayed with me:

later
our mothers went mad and
our brothers killed themselves
and we began this storytelling life
wondering whose father that was
wondering how did we survive
to live not happily but

ever after

How do you transcend the personal purging and healing in poems and make art out of your pain, your life? Lucille writes from a deep, deep place, and achieves a mastery over her experiences, owns them like her severed fingers in hands--she was born with polydactyly, two extra fingers on each hand:

look    hold these regulated hands
against the sky
see how they were born to more
than bone     see how their shadow
steadies what i remain     whole
alive      twelvefingered

I have been struggling with that question throughout the semester. The well in which I was born in, the circumstances of my life, has cast out my body into the familial fray of brokenness and stories, and I believe that all of us are born with many stories, stories that haunt us from memory and obsession. "... the only mercy is memory" is how Lucille begins this beautiful poetry collection, and I think this gives way to the veil of her message, pulls apart the wall of threads that protect the narrator-persona of her poems. She constantly changes the centre of the poem, the big and little "I's", like in Powell, where she speaks from the point of view of one of the officers who beat Rodney King.

In her next two sections september song: a poem in 7 days and the message from the Ones, she continues to shift the centre, whether through process and rumination or through the logos, through the beginning Word (alluding to creation and Genesis). I am enthralled by her mastery, her whispered singsong that strikes me at a deeper place. Her work centers itself into a voice grounded in its time and place and cultural geography, but is able to transcend into a lyrical testament of the soul enumerated by mercy and memory.

I want to end with her poem on a plaque outside the NYC Public Library. It just speaks to the thoughts I'm having right now: