Tuesday –Valentine’s Day + 1
The Super Bowl edged out yesterday’s Valentine’s Day post so here it is a day late. I’ve always liked Lucille Clifton’s “salt” because it gives us insight into her marriage to Fred Clifton, who tragically died of lung cancer before his time (he didn’t smoke).
Lucille joined us at St. Mary’s College of Maryland not long after Fred had died but, because she was a private person, I never learned too much about him. As I read the poem, she all but says that Fred was an acquired taste—but that it was her taste (“precious and valuable only to her tribe”). In the history of the word, salt has been used as currency in certain cultures and Clifton plays on that fact here.
And then there’s how she comes across to Fred. While she acknowledges that she can rub Fred raw in quarrels that end in tears (or at any rate, that leave “a tearful taste”), she is also what he needs. Maybe he is drawn to her because she rubs him raw. From what I can tell, he was no less a forceful personality than she was.
Clifton doesn’t use the Valentine’s Day cliché that their love is as deep as the ocean. Instead, she says that her husband will strain the entire ocean for a taste of her. Which is romantic in a visceral type of way.
Here’s the poem:
he is salt
to her,
a strange sweet
a peculiar money
precious and valuable
only to her tribe,
and she is salt
to him,
something that rubs raw
that leaves a tearful taste
but what he will
strain the ocean for and
what he needs
