“Some years there exists a wanting to escape...” from Citizen
Some years there exists a wanting to escape—
you, floating above your certain ache—
still the ache coexists.
Call that the immanent you—
You are you even before you
grow into understanding you
are not anyone, worthless,
not worth you.
Even as your own weight insists
you are here, fighting off
the weight of nonexistence.
And still, this life parts your lids, you see
you seeing your extending hand
as a falling wave—
/
I they he she we you turn
only to discover
the encounter
to be alien to this place.
Wait.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
The opening, between you and you, occupied,
zoned for an encounter,
given the histories of you and you—
And always, who is this you?
The start of you, each day,
a presence already—
Hey you—
/
Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are
everywhere and you are nowhere in the day.
The outside comes in—
Then you, hey you—
Overheard in the moonlight.
Overcome in the moonlight.
Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you
hear this—what happens to you doesn't belong to you,
only half concerns you He is speaking of the legionnaires
in Claire Denis's film Beau Travail and you are pulled back
into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze—
The world out there insisting on this only half concerns
you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half
concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only.
/
And still a world begins its furious erasure—
Who do you think you are, saying I to me?
You nothing.
You nobody.
You.
A body in the world drowns in it—
Hey you—
All our fevered history won't instill insight,
won't turn a body conscious,
won't make that look
in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing
to solve
even as each moment is an answer.
/
Don't say I if it means so little,
holds the little forming no one.
You are not sick, you are injured—
you ache for the rest of life.
How to care for the injured body,
the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?
And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?
Even now your voice entangles this mouth
whose words are here as pulse, strumming
shut out, shut in, shut up—
You cannot say—
A body translates its you—
you there, hey you
/
even as it loses the location of its mouth.
When you lay your body in the body
entered as if skin and bone were public places,
when you lay your body in the body
entered as if you're the ground you walk on,
you know no memory should live
in these memories
becoming the body of you.
You slow all existence down with your call
detectable only as sky. The night's yawn
absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle
to the sun ready already to let go of your hand.
Wait with me
though the waiting, wait up,
might take until nothing whatsoever was done.
/
To be left, not alone, the only wish—
to call you out, to call out you.
Who shouted, you? You
shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes
sounding like you, you sometimes saying you,
go nowhere,
be no one but you first—
Nobody notices, only you've known,
you're not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad—
It's just this, you're injured.
/
Everything shaded everything darkened everything
shadowed
is the stripped is the struck—
is the trace
is the aftertaste.
I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to
know whatever was done could also be done, was also
done, was never done—
The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much
to you—
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.
Copyright Credit: Claudia Rankine, “Some years there exists a wanting to escape...” from Citizen.
Copyright © 2014 by Claudia Rankine.
Source: Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014)
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