Fishing the White Water

Men claim the easiest spots
stand knee-deep in calm dark water
where the trout is proven.

I never intended to press beyond
the sharp lines set as boundary
named as the razor names
parting the skin
and seeing the shapes of our weakness
etched into afternoon
that sudden vegetarian hunger for meat
tears on the typewriter
tyrannies of the correct
we offer mercy    forgiveness
to ourselves and our lovers
to the failures we underline daily
insisting upon next Thursday
yet forgetting to mention each other's name
the mother of desires
wrote them under our skin.

I call the stone    sister    who remembers
my grandmother's hand
brushed    on her way to market
to the ships
you can choose    not to live
near the graves where your grandmother sings
in wind through the corn.

There have been easier times
for loving    different richness
if it were only the stars
we had wanted
to conquer
I could turn from your dear face
into the prism light makes
along my line
we cast into rapids
alone    back to back
laboring the current.

In some distant summer
working our way farther from bone
we will lie in the river
silent as caribou
and the children will bring us food.

You carry the yellow tackle box
a fishnet over your shoulder
knapsacked
I balance the broken-down rods
our rhythms pass through the trees
staking a claim    in difficult places
we head for the source.

1984

Excerpted from Our Dead Behind Us by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1986 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992), who died of cancer in the Virgin Islands, is author of more than eight volumes of poems and four collections of essays, including Zami, Chosen Poems: Old and New, A Burst of Light, Sister Outsider, and Our Dead Behind Us. She taught at Tougaloo College (Mississippi), John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Hunter College.

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