Writing Love: Into a New Correspondence with Ourselves
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Writing LoveInto a New Correspondence with Ourselves
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Callaloo © 2012
[End Page 582]
I live where it’s grey: Ithaca, NY, “a place full of winters.” Each year—is it always in fall?—I travel to some settled upon black lit space to confer with black people whose minds and bodies I love. I travel with my heart, who calls herself Dagmawi and walks on legs and laughs and encourages all my naughtiness; my heart, himself joy, who in the car asks me why it is again trees change colors in fall, so that I must remind myself the process by which maple leaves blush, spent of chlorophyll, full of sugar after photosynthesis stops. Each year in the between-stillness of fall, love
discovers itself. Writing Purchase, writing Coal Tar Colors, I arrive in Princeton to the hover of a published love letter (and Black letters) as though to a vodka-soaked tune, to find myself necessarily and beautifully, masterfully unsettled. (And Billie slurs “There is nothing left for me to save.”) Errant again, because, half-crowing “But that was mine! That was for me!”— the love letter, I mean—slurring toward possession and law— wanting to save them for myself—I rehearse materials: parchment, of which I spoke to my heart; parchment on which I penned a reply. But why wasn’t my first impulse to dance across letters aslant like a flurry of yellow leaves across the empty space above a street? “Yes,”
the author of my love letter teases. “You femme girls want everything.” So why not strut too that chagrin? That is, both skins: the one surface roughed to rub, to polish; the other dressed to take ink. If black life is public property, by Purchase, I meant to write myself onto the walls of the house I own. And searching the cure for some other woe, uncover the pink trying to be purple in processed coal. In the black veins biographies of mauve. Each year, I intend not to shame that part of myself that walks apart from me: that is, you [End Page 583] because “our world is full of sound/our world is more lovely than anyone’s.” The love letter began, “How dare I?” Beyond that, to move us, no incantation’s set. How dare we but publicly love each other, like this, home? [End Page 584]
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, an associate professor at Cornell University, is author of two books of poems, Black Swan (winner of 2001 Cave Canem Prize) and Open Interval (a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award); and co-author, with Elizabeth Alexander, of Poems in Conversation and a Conversation. Her poems have also appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Rattapallax, Shenandoah, Roll Call, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and Angles of Ascent.
