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by Toi Derricotte
i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming,
a horrible brain in water.
i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle,
when you had no sustenance of metal
when you had no boat to travel
when you stayed in the same
place, treading the question;
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat. we swam
in the last trickle of champagne
before we knew breastmilk—we
shared the night of the closet,
the parasitic
closing on our thumbprint,
we were smudged in a yellow book.
son, we were oak without
mouth, uncut, we were
brave before memory.
April 23, 2009 Today's poem is from Poems from the Women's Movement, published by Library of America. |
 photo © Dorothy Alexander |  |
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Toi Derricotte
Toi
Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1941. She earned her
B.A. in special education from Wayne State University and her M.A. in
English literature from New York University.
Her books of poetry include Tender (1997) which won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the
Death House (1978). She is also the author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton, 1997), which won the 1998 Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.
Together with Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem, a workshop retreat for black poets, in 1996.
About her work, the poet Sharon Olds has said, "Toi Derricotte's poems show us our underlife, tender and
dreadful. And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living
creature, the one who escaped—and paused, and turned back, and saw, and
cried out. This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in
American poetry today."
Her honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society
of America, two Pushcart Prizes, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts
Award from the United Black Artists, and fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim, and the
Maryland State Arts Council.
She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.