Poet: Toi Derricotte

Market

Those huge platters on their heads on which everything
is placed accurately, each small red pepper,
prawn, each orange─each arranged in piles so tall they defy gravity─
avocados, crabs, dried fish of silverish brown,
or one great yam, thirty pounds, dirt brushed,
counterbalanced in a kind of aquarium.
A woman approves me with a fluent grin
and offers her light basket for my head;
I walk a yard, tottering awkwardly.
The unremarkable commonness─
a beauty shaped by women's hands.

Photo: Rachel Eliza Grriffiths

Family Secrets

They told my cousin Rowena not to marry
Calvin─she was too young, just eighteen,
& he was too dark, too too dark, as if he
had been washed in what we wanted
to wipe off our hands. Besides, he didn't come
from a good family. He said he was going
to be a lawyer, but we didn't quite believe.
The night they eloped to the Gotham Hotel,
the whole house whispered─as if we were ashamed
to tell it to ourselves. My aunt and uncle
rushed down the the Gotham to plead─
we couldn't imagine his hands on her!
Families are conceived in many ways.
The night my cousin Calvin lay
down on her, that idol with its gold skin
broke, & many of the gods we loved
in secret were freed.

From a Letter: About Snow

for Chana Bloch

I am at a retreat house,
and the nun who runs the house told me to look at my face in the mirror.
I did, but the only thing I keep seeing is the face of Snow, the huge Pyrenees
sheep dog.
He's so frightened, they can't let him off his leash!
His human eyes, long-suffering, like a saint who's forgotten how to smile.
I hear the breed is naturally shy, and this one was abused by his previous owner.
No wonder he backs away!
But to see a creature so large─120 pounds─so timid.
Once, they say, scared by a deer, he broke his leash and ran.
A mile away a woman stopped with her pickup and he jumped right in!
Who knows why the frightened make decisions!
Today I jogged with him, his thick rangy self leading the way.
Now we're sitting in the shade by the community house while I write this letter.