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  • The Undertaker’s Daughter, and: Gershwin
  • Toi Derricotte (bio)

The Undertaker’s Daughter

Terrified at a reading to read poems about my fears & shames,

a voice in me said: Justopen your mouth. Now

I read about Anubis, the God of Egypt

who ushered the dead to the underworld, who performed the ritual of

“The opening of the mouth”

so they could see, hear & eat.

Had it been my father speaking,

giving me back that depth of taste & color,

fineness of sound that his rages stifled,

twisted & singed shut? I had thought

it was a woman’s— though I had hoped

all my life that my father would feed me that milk my mother could not [End Page 67]

make from her body. Once, when I opened the door & saw

him shaving, naked, his sole resting on the toilet, I thought

those things hanging down were udders. From then on I understood there was a

female part he hid—something soft & unprotected

I shouldn’t see.

Gershwin

It’s a good thing to be friends with the dead. I’m starting to realize that, with friends, being dead isn’t that important. Take me and Gershwin, for example—who keeled over at a cocktail party at thirty-six years old playing “Rhapsody in Blue.” And isn’t that the best way to go—like if I was to go right now as I’m writing this poem—the notes so alive in my hands that fear is blown right out of the socket?

It’s either a very small or a very large place we live in—our cosmos, our kitchen—so many generations packed up close! You realize lots of things as you get ready. The creaky doors of the heart open—just like a one-track mind. I’m nobody, and yet I have this particular place on this particular bench and nobody can do it better! [End Page 68]

I’m listening to that last, hopeful song of Porgy’s, the cripple in rags taking off in his rickety goat cart, fearless—no matter how far—he’s going to find his love.

Oh Lawd, I’m on my way,I’m on my way,To the heavenly land . . .

How wonderful that either you understood this age so well that you captured the vibrations. Or else you invented what we know. Did some lingering ancestor flood your heart with a blue note? Did some black woman play the scale for you?

I wonder if it’s so convincing, with its sad happiness—as if there’s a town right to the side of the stage where we’ll be able to drop Porgy a line—because Gershwin is telling us how happy he is to be driving his own poor cart. Oh Lawd, I’m on my way . . . Only thirty-six, his work here over.

Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte is the author of a memoir, The Black Notebooks, and four books of poetry: Tender, Captivity (which won the Paterson Poetry Prize), Natural Birth, and Empress of the Death House. She has received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is the cofounder of Cave Canem, the historic workshop/retreat for African American poets.

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