The End of the Alphabet

Poems

Claudia Rankine

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802198532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A "harrowing and hallucinogenic" collection of poems from author of the New York Times –bestselling National Book Award-finalist Citizen: An American Lyric ( Library Journal ). Claudia Rankine's book-length poem about rising racial tensions in America, Citizen: An American Lyric, won numerous prizes, including the The National Book Critic's Circle Award. Her new collection of poems—intrepid, obsessive, and erotic—tell the story of a woman's attempt to reconcile herself to her own despair. Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after is her singular voice—its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine's power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare. From one of contemporary poetry's most powerful and provocative authors, The End of the Alphabet is a work where "wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief's genius" ( Boston Review ).

Toward biography

*

Who distributes the live or die

after juice is refused, the egg is fried?

Faced with its staggering number of runny noses

the day begins, begins again, talks above

the motor left running.

Then I pay what I am asked to pay

to enter the kiss,

the low bow

that does not touch the forehead to a scatter of needles

because the dove never comes

when the distance from wreckage to shore

is rimmed with yearning

suggesting once upon a time, our addiction to telling,

is all effort to shape what surfaces within the sane.

*

Ignore your own devastation and it doggedly shadows, resurfacing

across the first version, the flat world, forcing you within

the real conversation you hold with yourself.

If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this?

Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.

Or milk on the tongue tasted rude, unfortunate. And hunger

awoke as human. On all sides, riddled. Broken

and broke against. Inside, by earlier years, shook.

I am remembering the hours lived in, steep steps

angled, and the going up and down burdened before

the certain hand went out, pushed—

if only—

or to go again, doing nothing

to stop hurt releasing a body out. We live through, survive

without regard for the self. Forgiving

each day insisting it be forgiven, thinking

our lives umbilical, tied up with living with how far

we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner.

*

Inconsolable outdoorness of the heart

and the self—not to bridge that—with limbs vexed,

irises fretting the skinniest of hopes, out of wall cracks, upended

intestines, these organs, this imageless throat, much more than mud

locked together, microscopic genes, freezing surface of spleen,

crush of leaves beneath until the fragmented shadow

readjusts, until who I am differs. Then to pray from this body,

waiting—Dear, heart, you break in two. You do not break into.

*

Privately,

dukes up, duel or duck, beat on,

or laughter: swollen, leaking in

to appeal, To die.

For in the hysteria, craven.

To the life loved: I have given

my hand, my word:

solemn, the oath. And yet, still here, I am

cringing into

or tipped in the bone: no cushion here.

And the next minute with no clear word to speak

and sore-shouldered,

feeling foolishly subdued,

I do not say (not yet,

not quite), Reasoned out—Telephoned,

I’ll meet the party: dulcet is the Dubonnet

and yet the face cannot turn to turn the blind eye,

so monstrous is the stretch

across this cloudy spot on the cornea.

The resolution: to outride, outride: (what

the blues pull in. And in,

I don’t know, I arrived unprepared for the lobed, dark-

grayed matter of “wearisome” and cannot weep

so cannot wake scaled-back,

calm, outside the mirror.

*

as if anguishing should be excrement:

a flabby stink unbandaged

left out overnight:

as if anguishing should be

seeping intrusion hacked into:

as if anguishing:

*

The plunging. This time complex

neckline. This time phlegmatic

clavicle unburied—

which is a complicated situation.

His bibulous baby pulls her knees in.

When she gets to be happy

she is happy, but every smile this time

is a transaction—

fluey, bluesy, she is, she isn’t.

Any other night he would have

wanted to bed her, his red carpet runaway,

his simper silly—

black mascaraed down to her ankle,

unavailable tonight,

---

over the counter comes (wink wink)

points of upturned lip. crow’s-feet

embellishing the split eye.

roll away the nonsense. crumple.

cancel the flaming hoop.

feel sorry don’t.

take out the bathwater (slippery

the floor). sit down the long while.

*

(mosquitoes abundant. limit of white wall. stray thread. this tendency to worsen. the lowest throw at dice. the smallest amount. no subtleties. no who calls through the door. far from. skin enclosing. low-slung treachery. threat of. giving thirst back to the table. drawn breath holding. the shut eye.

peekaboo—

A she collapsing. some possible. some coherence unfastened.

nothing acceptable. nothing stitched together:

one mind but that mind cannot—

______________as if the world, extrinsic,

were methodically the wrong fountain, the one where water

is stagnant, the drainage blocked by nature’s things: leaves,

moss, dirt the wind put here:

I apologize, but I do not apologize.

*

(to sit next to the self.

to wait. the chair next to the bed.

to wait. and not for this.

to wait. so, naturally

in some wish working the way a grin does, stupidly

sweet.

in the before. the after. and bef...