Toi Derricotte. Photo by Ted Rosenberg
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Lauds
Good morning, fat chair. Your frame is slight-
Ly askew, your wooden bones tilt, but padded
With foam & polka dotted, you seem sprite-
Ly, good-natured. I’ve known a chair to rise
Out of a night’s darkness & provide a ride
For me, above the furry carpeting, defy-
Ing gravity. Even one cock-eyed, cheap,
Can be a tilted ship climb-
Ing waves of mourning. Whatever light
Shines through this morning’s slatted blinds—
Smoky with undelivered rain—I’ve turned aside
To praise my last-legged you, for (like Jessye
Norman’s lungs) your soul breathes blithe
Operatic air, & your polka dots climb
Atmospheric strophes like poems I memorized
In school. Do not go gentle, fat chair. What we write
About we are, so you are me, plumped with an extra
Twenty pounds, a bear, lumbering. But, in a poem, we
Dance with a relic of imagination &, by imagination, live.
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Toi Derricotte is the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, for outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career, and the 2020 Frost Medal from Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry. Her sixth collection of poetry, “I” New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award. Other books of poetry include The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, Captivity, Natural Birth, and The Empress of the Death House. Her literary memoir,The Black Notebooks,won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With Cornelius Eady, Derricotte co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. She is Professor Emerita from University of Pittsburgh and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Susan F. Campbell, Armchair, color pencil drawing, 1987