Yet I felt funny preparing to write about Clint's Above Ground. His voice is so engaging in these poems, and he tells so much of his daily life, hopes, and memories that reading him is like listening to a particularly entertaining friend over cocktails and a good dinner. To pull out a legal pad and make notes felt wrong.
So I'm looking back over his poems the way I look back over a satisfying conversation.
First, he shares snapshots of the kids -- lots of them -- mementoes of joy, wonder, laughter, exhaustion. Kids at bed time, at bath time, a baby in the womb no bigger than a fingernail, a baby strapped to Clint's chest as he dances in the grocery store -- before the manager asks him to stop alarming the customers. His boy wonders about space and the ocean. "Prehistoric Questions" about what killed the dinosaurs lead to the boy's asking, will he die, too (94). The father gives an inspired honest answer that's one of the biggest laughs of our time together. Ok, there was one bigger laugh in "You Ask Me What Sounds a Giraffe Makes" (78), but I won't spoil it by repeating his son's hypothesis.
Smith gets wistful when he sees reflections of earlier generations in his children. Setting his infant daughter into her grandfather's arms, he writes I saw the way your brows / furrowed just like his, how your eyes carry the same pools of wonder ("Roots" 25). He tries without success to explain to his son how we see stars as they were millions of years ago, but he does explain that he can see the "stardust" of his grandmother in this child she never met ("The Andromeda Galaxy is the Closest Galaxy to Our Milky Way" 92). He marks the day when he was no longer able to recall her voice (69).
He keeps coming back to his family tree - literally. It's in a park in New Orleans where his mother brought him to climb as a child, where she climbed as a little girl. In "Tree Rings" (40) he remembers how its branches bent down to the soil as if it had long been waiting to scoop us up. He shares what sounds like a memory about that tree, Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow ("All at Once" 3). His grandmother's voice, he tells his daughter, was the shade under an oak tree / and her laugh was the branch that / stretched down to let you climb it ("Legacy" 51). The tree also brings up bitter reflections about Katrina and its aftermath.
He tells how he's carrying on "Tradition" making French toast with his kids, as his father and his father's father did, though he doesn't remember the recipe so much as the feel of his father's hands wrapped around his (26-7). When he hears a tone of anger creep into his voice in "Across Generations," it's the echo of men attempting / to unlearn the anger on their father's / tongues.
So his conversation sometimes turns towards anger, but Smith keeps cool. He finds indirect ways to express what's bothering him. He lets us figure for ourselves that the customers alarmed by his dancing were white. He doesn't cite studies that show that doctors are likely to discount the concerns of black women when his wife's pregnancy goes awry. He detaches himself from the story, focused on her determination to save herself and their child while the professionals tell her "It's All in Your Head" (9). He gets a "Gold Star" from onlookers for being such a good dad, leaving unspoken the stereotype of the absentee black father (72). (For a white man's perspective on a black father, see my poem Behind Prejudice, written before I saw Smith's book.)
Smith channels anger at the way things are into his anxiety for the way things will be for his children. In line at the grocery store, he hears a white woman denounce a black athlete who knelt during the national anthem, blatant disrespect that would get him killed in some places, she says, approval implied, before she tells Smith how cute his infant son is. Thanking her, Smith silently asks his son, will she or someone like her, encountering you years from now, forget you were ever this boy and make you into something you aren't ("Your National Anthem" p.22-3)? Dispassionate lists of medical history "For the Doctor's Records" morph into spiritual anxieties: I run four times a week / but usually it's away from something and another black boy was killed by police, and, I haven't cried in a long time (66). Teaching his kids to marvel at the 17-year cicadas, he's suddenly disturbed to think about the society his adult children will live in the next time the cicadas come "Above Ground" (84).
Telling about his visit to a Confederate memorial (research for his book How the Word is Passed), he imagines what it would feel like to fall asleep in my home, to wake up, and to find my children gone, "When Standing in a Cabin at the Whitney Plantation" (102). The story draws extra power from all we've heard about the delight, hopes, and fears poured into his children.
Maybe it's just my love of language, but Smith's best moments of our time together were his dissections of language itself. In "Nomenclature," he explores his mother-in-law's native language Igbo, in which subtle changes of inflection turn sight into love (34). Putting a child to bed in "Ars Poetica" he explains that poems can be about anything -- a lamp, a door, Pluto. POEMS ARE INSIDE OF ME? the child asks, lifting his shirt to see the poetry in himself. They are, his father says (82), which seems to me like a huge blessing. Most of all, I love what Smith does with "Punctuation," demonstrations of how a little mark can change a meaning,
There is something in your eyes I can't get out.
There is something in your eyes; I can't get out.I am trying to help
or
I am trying to run away
each example better, deeper, more sorrowful than the last (96).
I enjoyed our time together, and I revisit it often. Can't wait for the next time.
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