Teahouse of the Almighty

Patricia Smith

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781566893664
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie américaine

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders.

"What power. Smith's poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster."—Marvin Bell

"I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem."—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judge

From Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation's premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry's liberating power.

RELATED TO THE BUTTERCUP, BLOOMS IN SPRING

I.

What do we do with these huge gifts of the throat and tongue?

How do we manage?

II.

I used to believe that nobody but me could see

the stars shimmering riot outside my window.

Mama, my stars are here, I’d say, my stars.

I welcomed them with a notebook, toothmarked Bic,

and teeny revolutions crammed into the stingy space

of a college-ruled line. I wrote until the precise script

wandered, until the stars blinked themselves dim

and said good-night Patricia Ann, it’s late even for us

and it hurts to watch how hard you dream.

One morning, I woke to find whole pages filled

with a single word—anemone. Over and over, ens

and ems straining to stern Palmer Method hilltops.

Anemone. Anemone.

Ms. Stein,

I can’t explain the dizzy I felt the day you chalked

that word on the board and said,

Who can pronounce this?

I wish I could grant you breath here,

but all I recall is dark hair vaguely flipped, a slight sour

to you, and the wary smile of a young Jewish girl

teaching on Walnut Street, just down the block

from your million miles away.

Funny, how you twisted me

by introducing a word

you figured would stump us all,

funny how I bellowed the odd accents

and a light grew slow and unbeckoned behind your eyes.

That one word was sweet silver on my new tongue,

it kept coming back to my mouth,

it was the very first sound I wanted to own,

to name myself after,

I wanted no one else to ever utter this.

Even now, listen to how anemone

circles, turns round, and surprises itself.

That day I gave that word a home just under my breath

and at least a hundred times

I drew on the drug of it, serving it up to the needing air.

All this before I knew what it meant.

(If you never remember feeling that way about a single word,

sensing a burn in the sheer power of its sound, lift up

your poetry—all those thick, important pages—and see that

it is resting on nothing. Then shred those sheets, toss them

to sky, and lie prone beneath the empty flutter. You must

own one word completely before you can claim another.)

Ms. Stein, go ahead,

make me nine again, take me back

to when I wasn’t afraid of anything

except long division and the words Go pull me off a switch,

when Karen Ford and I pulled our panties down

and wriggled up against each other for new taboo,

Ms. Stein, I couldn’t stop writing.

I wrote myself angled and tress-topped,

I wrote myself hero, I wrote myself white,

Cherokee, cheerleader, distressed damsel in Alan Ladd’s arms,

I wrote myself winged, worshipped, I wrote long stories

where I was always the primary twinkle, the beacon,

inevitably envied. I wrote anemone over and over

in rigid hand, the loops and hilltops perfect.

Anemone. Anemone.

When I was nine, the barbershops left their doors open

and all manner of glorious bullshit spilled out,

charms and curses spritzed with that mango oil

that makes black heads shimmer. Balls of sliced nap

slip sliding the tile, my people razzing and razored,

the dozens in effect, sentence songs, spontaneous doo-wop

where any two lines came together to make a corner.

I was little woman, sweet little crumbsnatcher,

baby you a pretty one,

won’t be long before those boys start ...