ABSTRACT
SUMMERTIME STRETCHES like hot gum; on thebottom of a shoe, that’s not a great quality, but in aclassroom, for a teacher working to propel her students up and over the hurdles of graduation and promotion, elastic, widening time can be a gift. In one summer-suspended class, a group of girls, all there because they had failed one or more classes during the fallto-spring high school year, are watching a DVD of Lucille Clifton reading her poems. As the tape starts, the girls are squirming and loud; the fact that they are inside and still in school while summer starts outside the buildingstarts, for all practical purposes, without them-means that nearly everyone is feeling prickly and deprived. A few of the young women sit with slumped chests collapsed down onto bellies, heads heavily settled onto arms crossed and resting on tabletops, eyelids firmly shut. Most are distractedly watching the monitor while they talk to their nearest, or even farthest, friends. Then Clifton’s voice rings out, and she is smiling as she begins:
The poem builds and Clifton’s voice swells, and then she closes with a head roll and a neck snap:
The girls are listening now, and giggling. Like them, Lucille Clifton is brown-skinned and full-bodied. Like theirs, her hips are substantial, for sure. But the students are young, ripe, smooth-skinned, and hickey-necked, while Clifton, as she speaks this frankly sexy word picture, is white-haired, a woman who is more likely at a grandmother’s distance from these students than a mother’s. Clifton continues:
Where just a moment before chairs swiveled and girls chuckled appreciatively about how their own big bot-
toms might spin some pleasure for a lover and for themselves, now the room erupted in a frenzy of distancing pronouncements.
