Cover

Title

On the Bus with Rosa Parks

Poems

Rita Dove

W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London

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for

Aviva

for

Fred

Epigraph

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST

“[Rita Dove’s] laser glance exposes and cauterizes its subjects in new and disturbing ways.”

—Helen Vendler, The New Yorker

“Dove’s poems read like short fums with the sound turned down. Centre-screen are vivid, often luscious details, while a quiet ironic voice-over points to the menace clouded by innocence or the sadness cramped by social niceties. She is an outstanding poet of the delicate nuances present in social complexity, of the lyric reflection embedded in the epic journey:”

—Sarah Maguire, Times Literary Supplement

“Dove has been extending the boundaries of her art, while also endeavoring to recover the past, be it that of European literary tradition or African-American history and culture.”

—Ben Howard, Poetry

Contents

Contents

Cameos

July, 1925—Night—Birth—Lake Erie Skyline, 1930—Depression Years—Homework—Graduation, Grammar School—Painting the Town—Easter Sunday, 1940— Nightwatch. The Son.

Freedom: Bird’s-Eye View

Singsong

I Cut My Finger Once on Purpose

Parlor

The First Book

Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967

Freedom: Bird’s-Eye View

Testimonial

Dawn Revisited

Black on a Saturday Night

My Mother Enters the Work Force

Black on a Saturday Night

The Musician Talks about “Process”

Sunday

The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians

The Venus of Willendorf

Incarnation in Phoenix

Revenant

Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved

Revenant

On Veronica

There Came a Soul

The Peach Orchard

Against Repose

Against Self-Pity

Götterdämmerung

Ghost Walk

Lady Freedom Among Us

For Sophie, Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000

On the Bus with Rosa Parks

Sit Back, Relax

“The situation is intolerable”

Freedom Ride

Climbing In

Claudette Colvin Goes to Work

The Enactment

Rosa

QE2. Transatlantic Crossing. Third Day.

In the Lobby of the Warner Theatre, Washington, D.C.

The Pond, Porch-View: Six P.M., Early Spring

Notes

Acknowledgments

Cameos

Cameos

Cameos

July, 1925

Lucille among the flamingos

is pregnant; is pained

because she cannot stoop to pluck

the plumpest green tomato

deep on the crusted vine.

Lucille considers

the flamingos, guarding in plastic cheer
the birdbath, parched

and therefore

deserted. In her womb

a dull—no, a husky ache.

If she picks it, Joe will come home

for breakfast tomorrow.

She will slice and dip it

in egg and cornmeal and fry

the tart and poison out.
Sobered by the aroma, he’ll show

for sure, and sit down

without a mumbling word.

Inconsiderate, then,

the vine that languishes

so!, and the bath sighing for water

while the diffident flamingos arrange

their torchsong tutus.

She alone is the blues. Pain drives her blank.

Lucille thinks: I can’t
even see my own feet.

Lucille lies down

between tomatoes

and the pole beans: heavenly shade.

From here everything looks

reptilian. The tomato plops

in her outstretched palm. Now

he’ll come, she thinks,

and it will be a son.

The birdbath hushes

behind a cloud
of canebreak and blossoming flame.

Night

Joe ain’t studying nobody.

He laughs his own sweet bourbon banner,

he makes it to work on time.

Late night, Joe retreats through

the straw-link-and-bauble curtain

and up to bed. Joe sleeps. Snores

gently as a child after a day of marbles.

Joe

knows somewhere

he had a father

who would have told him

how to act. Mama,

stout as a yellow turnip,

loved to bewail her wild good luck:

Blackfoot Injun, tall with

hair like a whip. Now

to do it

without him

is the problem. To walk into a day

and quietly absorb.

Joe takes after Mama.

Joe’s Mr. Magoo.

Joe

thinks, half

dreaming, if he ever finds

a place where he can think,

he’d stop clowning

and drinking and then that wife

of his would quit

sending prayers through the chimney.

Ah,

Lucille.

Those eyes, bright and bitter

as cherry bark, those

coltish shins, those thunderous hips!

No wonder he couldn’t leave

her be, no wonder whenever she began to show

he packed a fifth and split.

Joe

in funk and sorrow. Joe

in parkbench celibacy, in apostolic

factory rote, in guilt (the brief

astonishment of memory), in grief when

guilt turns monotonous.

He always knows when to go on home.

Birth

(So there you are at last—
a pip, a button in the grass.
The world’s begun
without you.

And no reception but
accumulated time.
Your face hidden but your name
shuddering on air!)

Lake Erie Skyline, 1930

He lunges, waits, then strikes again.
I’ll make them sweat, he thinks
and does a spider dance
as the fireflies shamble past.

The sky dims slowly; the sun
prefers to do its setting
on the other side of town.
This deeper blue smells
soft. The patterns in it
rearrange—he cups

another fly. (He likes to

shake them dizzy

in his hands, like dice, then

throw them out for luck.

They blink on helplessly

then stagger from the sidewalk

up and gone.)

Sometimes the night arrives

with liquor on its breath,

twice-rinsed and chemical.

Or hopped up, sparking

a nervous shimmy. Or

dangerously still, like his mother

standing next to the stove,

a Bible verse rousing her pursed lips.

He knows what gin is made from—
berries blue. He knows
that Jesus Saves. (His father
calls it Bitches’ Tea.)

And sisters—so many, their

names fantastic, myriad

as the points of a chandelier:

Corinna, Violet, Mary, Fay,

Suzanna, Kit, and Pearl. Each evening

when they came to check

his bed, he held his breath, and still

he smelled the camphor

and hair pomade. Saw

foreheads sleek, spitcurl

embellishing a cheek, lips

soft and lashes spiked

with vaseline. He waited

to be blessed.

They were

Holy Vessels, Mother said:
each had to wait
her Turn. And he, somehow,
was part of the waiting, he was
the chain. He was, somehow,
his father.

The latest victim won’t
get up—just lies there
in the middle of the walk
illuminating the earth
regular as breath.
He stomps and grinds
his anger in. Pulls
his foot away and yellow
streaks beneath the sole—
eggyolk flame, lurid
smear of sin.

Sisters,

laughing, take his shoes away
and bring them scraped
and ordinary
back. Idiots,
he thinks. No wonder
there’s so many of them.

But he can’t sleep.

All night beneath his bed,

the sun is out.

Depression Years

Pearl

can’t stop eating;

she wants to live!

Those professors

have it all backwards:

after fat came merriment,

simply because she was afraid to

face the world, its lukewarm

nonchalance

that generationwise had set
her people in a stupor of

religion and

gambling debts. (Sure, her

mother was an angel

but her daddy was

her man.)

Pearl laughs
a wet red laugh.

Pearl oozes

everywhere. When she was

young, she licked the walls free of chalk; she

ate dust for the minerals.

Now she just
enjoys, and excess
hardens on her like

a shell.
She sheens.

But oh, what

tiny feet! She tipples

down the stairs. She cracks a chair.

The largest baby shoe

is neat. Pearl laughs

when Papa jokes: Why don’t

you grow yourself some feet?

Her mother calls them

devil’s hooves.

Her brother

doesn’t

care.
He has

A Brain; he doesn’t notice.

She gives him of her own

ham hock, plies him with

sweetened yams. Unravels

ratted sweaters, reworks them

into socks. In the lean years

lines his shoes

with newspaper. (Main

thing is, you don’t

miss school.)

She tells him

it’s the latest style.

He never laughs.

He reads. He

shuts her out.

Pearl thinks

she’ll never marry—

though she’d

like to have

a child.

Homework

Graduation, Grammar School

Painting the Town

The mirror
in the hall is red.

Pearl

giggles: Pretty
as a freshly painted

barn. She tugs

a wrinkle down.

Since she’s discovered

men would rather drown

than nibble,

she does just

fine.

She’d like to show

her brother

what it is like to crawl

up the curved walls

of the earth, or

to be that earth—but

he has other plans.

Which is alright. Which is

As It Should Be.

Let the boy reach manhood

anyway he can.

Easter Sunday, 1940

A purity
in sacrifice, a blessedness

in shame. Lucille

in full regalia, clustered

violets and crucifix.

She shoos

a hornet

back to Purgatory,

rounds the corner, finds

her son in shirtsleeves staring

from the porch into the yard
as if it were the sea.

And suddenly

she doesn’t care.

(Joe, after all, came home.)

She feels as if

she’s on her back

again, and all around her

blushing thicket.

Nightwatch. The Son.

(Aggressively adult,
they keep their
lives, to which
I am a witness.

At the other end
I orbit, pinpricked
light. I watch.
I float and grieve.)

Freedom: Bird’s-Eye View

Freedom:
Bird’s-Eye View

Singsong

When I was young, the moon spoke in riddles

and the stars rhymed. I was a new toy

waiting for my owner to pick me up.

When I was young, I ran the day to its knees.

There were trees to swing on, crickets for capture.

I was narrowly sweet, infinitely cruel,
tongued in honey and coddled in milk,
sunburned and silvery and scabbed like a colt.

And the world was already old.
And I was older than I am today.

I Cut My Finger Once on Purpose

I’m no baby. There’s no grizzly man

wheezing in the back of the closet.

When I was the only one,

they asked me if I wanted a night-light

and I said yes—

but then came the shadows.

I know they make the noises at night.

My toy monkey Giselle, I put her

in a red dress they said was mine

once—but if it was mine, why did they yell

when Giselle clambered up the porch maple

and tore it? Why would Mother say

When you grow up, I hope you have

a daughter just like you

if it weren’t true, that I have a daughter
hidden in the closet—someone
they were ashamed of and locked away
when I was too small to cry.

I watch them all the time now:
Mother burned herself at the stove
without wincing. Father
smashed a thumb in the Ford,
then stuck it in his mouth for show.
They bought my brother a just-for-boys
train, so I grabbed the caboose
and crowned him—but he toppled

from his rocker without a bleat;
he didn’t even bleed.

That’s when I knew they were

robots. But I’m no idiot:

I eat everything they give me,

I let them put my monkey away.

When I’m big enough

I’ll go in, past the boa

and the ginger fox biting its tail

to where my girl lies, waiting . . .

and we’ll stay there, quiet,

until daylight finds us.

Parlor

We passed through

on the way to anywhere else.

No one lived there

but silence, a pale china gleam,

and the tired eyes of saints
aglow on velvet.

Mom says things are made
to be used. But Grandma insisted
peace was in what wasn’t there,
strength in what was unsaid.

It would be nice to have a room

you couldn’t enter, except in your mind.

I like to sit on my bed

plugged into my transistor radio,

“Moon River” pouring through my head.

How do you use life?

How do you feel it? Mom says

things harden with age; she says
Grandma is happier now. After the funeral,
I slipped off while they stood around
remembering—away from all
the talking and eating and weeping

to sneak a peek. She wasn’t there.
Then I understood why
she had kept them just so:

so quiet and distant,
the things that she loved.

The First Book

Open it.

Go ahead, it won’t bite.
Well . . . maybe a little.

More a nip, like. A tingle.
It’s pleasurable, really.

You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.

Sure, it’s hard to get started;
remember learning to use

knife and fork? Dig in:
You’ll never reach bottom.

It’s not like it’s the end of the world—
just the world as you think

you know it.

Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967

For a fifteen-year-old there was plenty

to do: Browse the magazines,

slip into the Adult Section to see

what vast tristesse was born of rush-hour traffic,

décolletés, and the plague of too much money.

There was so much to discover—how to

lay out a road, the language of flowers,

and the place of women in the tribe of Moost.

There were equations elegant as a French twist,

fractal geometry’s unwinding maple leaf;

I could follow, step-by-step, the slow disclosure
of a pineapple Jell-O mold—or take
the path of Harold’s purple crayon through
the bedroom window and onto a lavender
spill of stars. Oh, I could walk any aisle
and smell wisdom, put a hand out to touch
the rough curve of bound leather,
the harsh parchment of dreams.

As for the improbable librarian

with her salt and paprika upsweep,

her British accent and sweater clip

(mom of a kid I knew from school)—

I’d go up to her desk and ask for help

on bareback rodeo or binary codes,

phonics, Gestalt theory,

lead poisoning in the Late Roman Empire,

the play of light in Dutch Renaissance painting;

I would claim to be researching

pre-Columbian pottery or Chinese foot-binding,

but all I wanted to know was:

Tell me what you’ve read that keeps

that half smile afloat

above the collar of your impeccable blouse.

So I read Gone with the Wind because

it was big, and haiku because they were small.

I studied history for its rhapsody of dates,

lingered over Cubist art for the way

it showed all sides of a guitar at once.

All the time in the world was there, and sometimes

all the world on a single page.

As much as I could hold

on my plastic card’s imprint I took,

greedily: six books, six volumes of bliss,

the stuff we humans are made of:

words and sighs and silence,

ink and whips, Brahma and cosine,

corsets and poetry and blood sugar levels—

I carried it home, past five blocks of aluminum siding

and the old garage where, on its boarded-up doors,

someone had scrawled:

I CAN EAT AN ELEPHANT
IF I TAKE SMALL BITES.

Yes, I said, to no one in particular: That’s
what I’m gonna do!

Freedom: Bird’s-Eye View

The sun flies over the madrigals,

outsmarting the magisterial

wits, sad ducks

who imagine they matter.

What a parade! Wind tucks

a Dixie cup up its

sleeve, absconds

with a kid’s bright chatter

while above, hawks

wheel as the magistrates circle

below, clutching their hats.

I’m not buying. To watch

the tops of 10,000

heads floating by on sticks

and not care if one of them

sees me (though it

would be a kick!)

—now, that’s

what I’d call

freedom,

and justice,

and ice cream for all.

Testimonial

Back when the earth was new
and heaven just a whisper,
back when the names of things
hadn’t had time to stick;

back when the smallest breezes
melted summer into autumn,
when all the poplars quivered
sweetly in rank and file . . .

the world called, and I answered.

Each glance ignited to a gaze.

I caught my breath and called that life,

swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet.

I was pirouette and flourish,
I was filigree and flame.
How could I count my blessings
when I didn’t know their names?

Back when everything was still to come,
luck leaked out everywhere.
I gave my promise to the world,
and the world followed me here.

Dawn Revisited

Imagine you wake up

with a second chance: The blue jay

hawks his pretty wares

and the oak still stands, spreading

glorious shade. If you don’t look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.

Black on a Saturday Night

Black on a Saturday Night

My Mother Enters the Work Force

The path to ABC Business School

was paid for by a lucky sign:

ALTERATIONS, QUALIFIED SEAMSTRESS INQUIRE WITHIN.

Tested on sleeves, hers

never puckered—puffed or sleek,

leg-o’-mutton or raglan—

they barely needed the damp cloth

to steam them perfect.

Those were the afternoons. Evenings

she took in piecework, the treadle machine

with its locomotive whir

traveling the lit path of the needle

through quicksand taffeta

or velvet deep as a forest.

And now and now sang the treadle,

I know, I know. . . .

And then it was day again, all morning

at the office machines, their clack and chatter

another journey—rougher,

that would go on forever

until she could break a hundred words

with no errors—ah, and then

no more postponed groceries,
and that blue pair of shoes!

Black on a Saturday Night

This is no place for lilac

or somebody on a trip

to themselves. Hips

are an asset here, and color

calculated to flash

lemon bronze cerise

in the course of a dip and turn.

Beauty’s been caught lying

and the truth’s rubbed raw:

Here, you get your remorse

as a constitutional right.

It’s always what we don’t
fear that happens, always
not now and why are
you people acting this way
(meaning we put in petunias
instead of hydrangeas and reject
ecru as a fashion statement).

But we can’t do it—naw, because
the wages of living are sin
and the wages of sin are love
and the wages of love are pain
and the wages of pain are philosophy
and that leads definitely to an attitude
and an attitude will get you
nowhere fast so you might as well
keep dancing dancing till
tomorrow gives up with a shout,
’cause there is only

Saturday night, and we are in it—

black as black can,

black as black does,

not a concept

nor a percentage

but a natural law.

The Musician Talks abut “Process”

(after Anthony “Spoons” Pough)

I learned the spoons from

my grandfather, who was blind.

Every day he’d go into the woods

’cause that was his thing.

He met all kinds of creatures,

birds and squirrels,

and while he was feeding them

he’d play the spoons,

and after they finished

they’d stay and listen.

When I go into Philly

on a Saturday night,

I don’t need nothing but

my spoons and the music.

Laid out on my knees

they look so quiet,

but when I pick them up

I can play to anything:

a dripping faucet,

a tambourine,

fish shining in a creek.

A funny thing:

When my grandfather died,

every creature sang.

And when the men went out

to get him, they kept singing.
They sung for two days,
all the birds, all the animals.
That’s when I left the South.

Sunday

Their father was a hunting man.

Each spring the Easter rabbit sprung open

above the bathroom sink, drip slowed

by the split pink pods of its ears

to an intravenous trickle.

There was the occasional deer,

though he had no particular taste

for venison—too stringy, he said,

but made Mother smoke it up just in case,

all four haunches and the ribs.

Summer always ended with a catfish
large as a grown man’s thigh
severed at the hip, thrashing
in a tin washtub: a mean fish, a fish
who knew the world was to be endured
between mud and the shining hook.

He avoided easy quarry: possum
and squirrel, complacent carp.
He wouldn’t be caught dead
bagging coon; coon, he said,
was fickle meat—tasted like
chicken one night, the next like
poor man’s lobster. He’d never admit
being reduced to eating coon,
to be called out of his name
and into that cartoon.

It’s not surprising they could eat the mess
he made of their playground: They watched
the October hog gutted with grim fury,

a kind of love gone wrong, but oh
they adored each whiskery hock, each
ham slice brushed subterranean green.

They were eating his misery

like bad medicine meant to help them

grow. They would have done anything

not to see his hand jerk like that,

his belt hissing through the loops and around

that fist working inside the coils

like an animal gnawing, an animal

who knows freedom’s worth anything

you need to leave behind to get to it—

even your own flesh and blood.

The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians

This one is enormous: rough-cut,
the fur like matted felt—
and so much of it,

rising in vulgar mounds upon its back
as if the sand itself had belched
into heaven’s beard. Gods,

what malevolence! The eye a constant
rolling orb, glistening with ill intent,
yellowed, gummed with hair, more hairs

than you or I would care to count,

that eye marks every move its jailer makes

and waits for him to step too near—

one blow would cripple any man.
Another specimen stands bellowing
beneath the farthest palm. Though slighter,

it daunts equally, staked haunches
straining, muscles potent as the reek
that saturates our sun-baked marketplace.

About the larger one some purpose lurks:
Hindquarters splayed, it tugs against its ropes,
snorts, yearns its massive head and slavers

toward that godawful sound. Could
the drabber one be female, and its mate?
More monsters in our midst!

And yet . . . if these vile creatures be
like geese, or dogs, and their offspring
learn to cuddle the one

who coddles them first—why,
our fortune’s pegged for sure.
Let us display our sternest countenance,

then apportion what they most desire
according to the measure of their service.
A rare commodity, these beasts—

who cannot know

what beauty wreaks, what mountains

pity moves.

The Venus of Willendorf

Let your eye be a candle in a chamber,

your gaze a knife;

let me be blind enough

to ignite it.

— PAUL CELAN

She kneels on a workbench

strewn with clipper and trowel

to look out over the valley, red sun

still snagged on the farthest green fringe.

She’s early. Behind her

scratch the arbor’s last leaves

and a few gray birds pecking for crumbs

among the rose husks fallen to the veranda.

Arrived a week ago, one more exotic

in the stream of foreign students

invited to Herr Professor’s summer house

in the Wachau, she was taken

straight from train to tavern

to see the village miracle, unearthed

not five kilometers from this garden shed:

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