Poem of the Week 2024/1

It's been quite a while since I took a break from this feature but I thought I'd bring it back. I'll see how it goes.

to my last period

well girl, goodbye,

after thirty-eight years.

thirty-eight years and you

never arrived

splendid in your red dress

without trouble for me

somewhere, somehow

now it is done

and i feel just like

the grandmothers who,

after the hussy has gone,

sit holding her photograph

and sighing, wasn't she

beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

– Lucille Clifton

What I love about this poem is that after some initial shock that Clifton chooses what may seem like an unlikely & unpoetic subject – the mechanics of bodily functions – you realize that she has found in poetry the perfect vehicle for talking about an experience that is both generally submerged & intimate & profoundly influential (where do we live but in our bodies, & in the bodies of those around us?). There's no plot or narrative drive to the on-going menstrual cycle, nothing to hang a story or drama on. Poetry can be simultaneously incisive & wide-ranging, capturing hidden & evanescent but crucial experiences. After spending a huge portion of her life (no matter how long the poet lives, 38 years is a big chunk of her time) with an on-going & troublesome reality of existence, that part of her life is passing away.

The poem can seem casual, with its use of lower-case lettering throughout & its lack of regular meter & rhyme & its personification of the period as girl, but there's also a certain formality to her realization: the way goodbye is set off in commas, the fancy splendor of the metaphorical red dress, the balance of the stanzas: each one seven lines long, & of course seven plus seven equals fourteen, the standard number of lines in a sonnet, the great form of love poetry; & as in a Spenserian sonnet, there is a division of the poem into two: the first stanza develops the poet's lengthy & difficult relationship with her girl, & the second resolves in an image exploring the feelings the relationship has left her with.

girl suggests a friendly & even intimate relationship, but it's not an easy one: when the girl arrives, in the splendor of her showy red dress, there's always trouble in one way or another: not the same way, which might be predictable & therefore manageable, but a new way each time. Red is a color with many associations: here, obviously, there's a reference to blood, but red blood also suggests vitality, vigor, a life force; red is associated with power, worldly but also emotional power (think of a cardinal's robes), as well as transgression & danger (scarlet sins, flashing red lights, fire engines, stop signs), &, particularly in women's clothes, sexual vibrancy.

It's a lot for the poet to deal with on a regular basis – the unpredictability of the trouble, the presence of a force (for of course the personification of the period as a girl outside of the poet, a companion, is metaphorical for something happening in her own body, mostly invisible to the outside world) that is maybe in some ways more powerful, & certainly more noticeable, than she herself is (the poet's use of the lower-case i rather than the usual I plays into this suggestion). The farewell is complicated. For one thing, menopause is a sign of aging: there's an area of life that, however vexing, she has now moved past, &, of course, moving past these stages of life brings us closer to its end. So she likens herself not to someone starting out on a new, post-menopausal stage, but as an elder: one of the grandmothers.

The poet presents the grandmothers as seated (rather than actively moving about) & in a meditative, reminiscent mood. There's a crepuscular quality to the image. The hussy has gone out of their lives. But who exactly is she? Hussy is not a term of approval, but it's also not a term of strong disapproval (the way whore or tramp would be). There might even be some level of admiration for the woman bold & unconventional enough to earn the title: she's an emblem of a path, the perhaps more dangerous & exciting path, not taken, the life not lived. What is the relationship between the grandmother & the hussy? Not quite an easy one; otherwise the grandmother wouldn't be calling her hussy. But clearly a memorable one; otherwise the grandmother wouldn't have, let alone keep, a photograph of her. Was the hussy a sister or cousin, a friend, a rival for the implied but otherwise absent grandfather's love? Clearly the relationship between the grandmother & the hussy is more emotionally resonant for the grandmother than her relationship with the husband/grandfather. There must be such a man; otherwise she would be an old woman rather than a grandmother. But he's not really present or significant here, except as the implicit reason for the grandmother's conventional social standing.

Hussy & trouble: they go together, companions, just as the poet & the girl were companions. Now that they're gone, the poet realizes something vital has departed from her life. This deprivation, this loss of connection with the active world, this movement towards death: these are difficult things to take in & accept. The poet explores them indirectly, as if a baldly direct statement would be too much to deal with: she uses the comparison to the seated grandmothers hanging on to their photographs & their memories. But they are interpreting those memories, & their final summation of the complex relationship is: beautiful.  Attention is drawn to the word by having it start the final line, right after the emphatic line break, & then it's repeated as the final word in the poem: beautiful. It may be nostalgia once the trouble is finally forever out of her life, but it's a loving & ultimately warm & accepting way to sum up a crucial & difficult relationship.

Here's another thing I love about this poem: this is not an experience I will ever have, but Clifton brings its emotionally complexity to vivid life so that the reader can gain a memorable insight into a life that is usually hidden from him – a brief poem leading to an expanding burst of empathy. I can find echoes of her experience in experiences with my own aging body.

I took this poem from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young for the Library of America.