Contents
Preface to the New and Selected Poems
Speculations about "I"
After all those years of fear and raging in my poems
After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading
Among school children
As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn't change
Biographia Literaria Africana
Blessed angels
Elegy for my husband
The enthusiast
The exchange
Gifts from the dead
Bad Dad
Glimpse
I count on you invisible
I give in to an old desire
On a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth
Homage
Jerry Stern's friendship
La fille aux cheveux de lin
Lauds
Midnight: Long Train Passing
My father in old age
A nap
1. False Gods
2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away
Note
Pantoum for the Broken
The Peaches of August
The permission
The proof
Rereading Jerry Stern
Sex in old age
Streaming
Summer evening at Still Point
Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly
Watching a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God
"What are you?"
The Empress of the Death House
sleeping with mr. death
the story of a very broken lady
the mirror poems
the face/as it must be/of love
doll poem
new lady godiva
The Empress of the Death House
The Feeding
The Funeral Parade
from a group of poems thinking about Anne Sexton on the anniversary of her death
unburying the bird
Natural Birth
Introduction: Writing Natural Birth
november
holy cross hospital
maternity
10:29
transition
delivery
in knowledge of young boys
Captivity
The Minks
Blackbottom
Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
St. Peter Claver
The Weakness
Fires in Childhood
High School
Hamtramck: The Polish Women
The Struggle
Before Making Love
On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings
Stuck
Squeaky Bed
The Good Old Dog
The Promise
For a Man Who Speaks with Birds
Touching/Not Touching: My Mother
My Father Still Sleeping after Surgery
Boy at the Paterson Falls
Fears of the Eighth Grade
The Furious Boy
In an Urban School
The Polishers of Brass
For the Dishwasher at Boothman's
Plaid Pants
Books
Allen Ginsberg
On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses
A Note on My Son's Face
Tender
Preface
Tender
The Journey
Tourists' Lunch
Beneath Elmina
Slavery
Power
Market
When My Father Was Beating Me
Black Boys Play the Classics
Brother
Family Secrets
After a Reading at a Black College
For Black Women Who Are Afraid
Passing
Bookstore
Invisible Dreams
Bird
1:30 A.M.
Dead Baby Speaks
The Origins of the Artist: Natalie Cole
From a Letter: About Snow
Not Forgotten
Grace Paley Reading
Clitoris
The Undertaker's Daughter
An apology to the reader
PART I. THE UNDERTAKER'S DAUGHTER
I am not afraid to be memoir
Beds
The undertaker's daughter
Sunday afternoon at Claire Carlyle's
Dolls
Mistrust of the beloved
PART II. A MEMORY OF THE FUTURE
I see my father after his death
My dad & sardines
The new pet
The Telly Cycle
For Telly the fish
Special ears
Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly
On the reasons I loved Telly the fish
Because I was good to Telly in his life,
An apology to Telly the revolutionary
When the goddess makes love to me,
Untitled
The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday
When I touched her
A little prayer to Our Lady
Cherry blossoms
PART III. THE UNDERTAKING
The exigencies of form
The undertaking
Acknowledgments