The Plum Flower Dance : Poems 1985 To 2005 [1 ed.] 9780822978190, 9780822959793

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The Plum Flower Dance

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Pi t t P oet ry Ser ies Ed Ochester, Editor

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The Plum Flower Dance 梅 舞 P oems 1985 to 2005

Afaa Michael Weaver 蔚 雅 風

University of Pittsburgh Press

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Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2007, Afaa Michael Weaver All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-5979-3 ISBN 10: 0-8229-5979-8

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to my teacher Shifu Huang Chien Liang 師傅黃乾量 天 山 派

in memory of George Houston Bass mentor and friend 1938–1990

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To straighten the crooked You must first do a harder thing— Straighten yourself. —The Dhammapada

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Contents Gold Ego 3 A Meditation for My Son  4 Sandy Point  5 The Madman Raises the Dead  7 An Improbable Mecca  8 The Peacock Feather in Texas  11 The Poet Reclining  12 High Sierra  13 Water I: I awoke mute  17 Radio Days  18 Beginnings 19 Lamentations 20 White Shoes and Swings  21 Hershey’s Chocolate  22 Mt. Zion Baptist  23 The Robe  25 The Dogs  26 The Appaloosa  27 A Woman from Fredericksburg  28 Science 30 Going to Church with C.W.  31 In C.W.’s Closet  33 Dialing for Dollars  35 A Maxim  36 Wood LIV: Cats climbing  41 Sears Roebuck   42

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American Income  43 Fifteen Years  44 Baby Boy  45 The Lawn  46 The Poets  48 The Southpaw  50 Rambling 51 My Father’s First Baseball Game  52 The Final Trains of August  53 The Picnic, an Homage to Civil Rights  58 Thelonious 60 The Last Jazz Club  62 Composition for White Critics . . .  66 Sam’s 70 Zombie Dance, Tapping the Bloodroot  72 Fire LXIII: The eighth light  77 My Heart  78 Tuna Fish  79 Sub Shop Girl  81 Reunions 83 PMS 86 An Elegy for Lorraine Hansberry  87 Friendship, 1994  89 House Training  90 Adam and Eve  91 The Model  92 Lovers with Flowers  93 Self-Portrait 94 Solitude 95 x

The Path  96 DaMo Before the Wall  97 Earth XXIX: Every organization  101 Borders 102 Water Song  103 Luxembourg Garden  106 New England  108 My Father’s Geography  118 Theme for Intermediate Chinese  119 Notes 122 Acknowledgments 124

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Gold

金

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Ego God’s voice is caught in the crackling commotion of thought, like dried leaves— breaking

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A Meditation for My Son for Kala

When I go spinning, your care is given to the steel nerves of reticent angels. When I cannot hold, my own heart drops away, some sure finger from a faded portrait follows you in the thorn-filled curves of man’s road. When I cannot dream, I pray in blind rooms that possible colors and bodies will converge around you, set you sailing over rocks, away from the soulless. When I am not whole, I entrust you to seraphim in their difficult dominion.

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S andy Point for Kevin E. Maddox

A flounder follows the line in its mouth, over the puzzle frame of black rocks, to a silent man. It is a dark fish now on land, this high grass and sand, across from the steel mill. My son and my brother are my two sons, only four years apart I am father and brother, petitioning for authority, for obedience, for adoration. My son throws in his line, pulls out another fish, life from life. He has every gift and does not know my mother’s dying wish. Take care of Kala. Protect him. I have a bay rod and reel, always too much, and my brother and son have Zippos, ten bucks for any fish in the Point. Here the ghosts of clippers full of Igbo, Hausa, Wolof, Mandinke, and more, all these notions of God, ease by on invisible ships. I stop, hoping for fish, and study humidity rising with abandon, boppers dancing the boogaloo, the rippling egotism of light. My boys take their fish home to my mother. She laughs at how big they are, how small. Later, one morning, my brother

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will go into another fit of anger, troubling his twin sister, who is his angel. He will threaten to walk out into the street, the moving cars. Five years to live, my mother tells him, It is a good day to die. Hook, line in the mouth.

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The Madman R aises the Dead The morticians have a way of wrapping babies in plastic bags where gases encase the bodies, leaving no cuts or loud drainings. But I washed you myself, in sweet soap and warm water, eased your tiny feet in white socks and finished you with a blue top. Now in an angel’s loud armor, I kneel near the stone cross above your grave, watching the grass shudder, waiting for this night to burn and fall so that every dead soul that touches your bones will fill with air and sing.

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An Improbable Mecca I am here in the house of my childhood, my youth, of the quiet and whisperings from walls that have watched me lose my two front teeth to a cousin slinging a baby doll, walls that have recorded the saltatory eruptions in the living room floor where the whole of us learned the premeditated Manhattan and the snap and flare of the bossa nova, the twist, here in this house where quiet ruled like an avenging saint even when I rolled, drunk and dirty, in the living room at seventeen, home from college with hoodlum friends, in the year of the Black Quartet. This house opens its eyes, reaches to me with hands held together in silent prayer, begging me to take every lesson and go on with life peacefully, out of its contemplation, out of the lives it has absorbed, out of my father’s pondering step, coming home in the evenings in his brown, leather bomber jacket, ecclesiastical and provident, out of my mother’s discordant singing as she put yellow ribbons in my invalid grandmother’s hair, singing old spirituals removed from new hymn books, always 8

falling back to her favorite, “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” Her humble cry resounds in the tiny mind of my ear when I slide my hands down the walls as I ease down the stairs of this house where mother and grandmother died, where the bones of this home screamed until they were thin as glass when I lost my mind. This house throws back its head and laughs in a resplendent roar when I ask it to remember the first poem I wrote at eight, the Sears & Roebuck bicycle with whitewalls and headlights, the first girlfriend in the fourth grade, the first wife at nineteen, the long hours of studying, the lectures on ancestry from Grandma, the delicate cloth of talking and sharing I built with my father as we became the next two on the prophetic end of the pew, the anxious, sleepless nights while we listened to Bessie frying the chicken for the trip down-home, south to Virginia, back to the embracing roots that made us believe unfalteringly that we were truly wealthy, the pious Sunday mornings when I marched off to the Baptist church quiet and measured like the Methodists and Lutherans, 9

with my usher’s badge and my belief. This house stands before me and in my memory, a monument perfectly aligned to the stars, luminescent and sentient, a life in and of itself and ourselves, as patient and kind and suffering as anyone could ever hope a house to be when chattering children kick in its lap, men lie in it, trying to accommodate their future, when women paint it with song from the old world of patriarchal law, when death comes lusting after it with sledgehammers and stillness— I come to the front steps and sit as I did when I was a child and hope that I can hold to this through life’s celebrations and calamities, until I go shooting back into the darkness of my origin in some invisible speck in an indeterminable brick of this house, this remembering.

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The Peacock Feather in Tex as The cows walk to the fence, some faster, some thinking a feast. We twirl away from their long horns when they turn, the tips that can gore and hook up into the belly, the crucible. The heat is bebop above us, in the soft eyes of these big heads. The earth is a rock, a blooming shout. For $.25 we buy a peacock feather. I cannot name it, but it is why I have returned to farms, to the idea of growing. Here there are plenty horns to undo, to dig hollow and fill with prayers, to dream straight a once-curved power. We can take what we want and keep it. Love, O Careless Love Children play around us, climbing tractors, slipping but not falling. Crusted fathers spit from hell at this ranch, a spoiled adventure. In this nightmare holler of Africa mothers study the air, hiding the spoils of love & war.

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The Poet Reclining I can never convince my father that my best work is done in naps, in the greenest of grass, near the smell of manure, in the song of neighing and snorting, in the infinite music that fills the word with bright meaning. After I am half out of life, I can have discourse with the trees, with each leaf that tickles itself, and flirts with the branch, sending me the secrets of a woman, of the distinguishing flurry of her smile. In this grass I always dream that if I stay a little longer I will leave this skin, skull, heart, brain, femur, and blood, and melt into the soil and multiply like the infinite beads of this planet, becoming the thing I spend my life singing to. But I cannot convince my father, who uses manure, tearfully, for flowers, hoping to raise my mother from her berth in the earth.

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High Sierr a I take my Schwinn High Sierra bicycle down the gravel road through the woods. I am afraid of the physics of speed and hills, afraid that the whir might become a hush where the trees, brush, and flowers whisper a song that wishes away virtual harm. You warned me of this danger when I abandoned you in the steel skeleton of the warehouse. I left my home and my wife, emblems of failure. The brakes squeak on the steel rims. They sound like a bird with a broken wing caught out in the thick undergrowth. It hopes that no predator, cat or fox, will find it and rip its weaknesses, cut it to the bone and beyond to where nothing is left. What will verify the imperfect memories that we hope will resurrect the dreams that took body and then disappeared? Do all the moments of a life fade into the scattered conversations of the old? At the blessed bottom of the hill, I look back up at the top, where I began. It eludes me, shifts with shadow, moves along in alliance with the sun. I cannot see the sun, its heavy fire. I circle in the sand on the bottom, wonder if I have succeeded or failed. I am not sure if I can pedal uphill, even with the lowest of my fifteen gears. They are so low that I am not exercised. In a northern light away from my southern birth, I ask you, my friend the trumpet player, may I pretend? Why do land and love bind? 13

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Water

水

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I I awoke mute in a daydream. God’s song began.

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R adio Days for Mark J. Weaver

My father has a picture of me taken around the time Charlie Parker died. I am sitting up like a prince, erect, bright, smiling. I have promise around my head woven in vines of gold, but this is not in the picture. I remember radio from then, checking the paper for my shows. My father had a habit of bringing home toys to me, small things on days he got paid. It was a reward for being firstborn and being a son. I was supposed to make the future a safe place. I had to kill the lion. I look at my son and my brother. I look at my father. The four of us are a circuit where the current is a stream of hope & fear, floating, going back, living and not living. We hold up our hands and dreams fly out of them, birds of blue electric.

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Beginnings The house on Bentalou Street had a cemetery behind it, where the white hands of ghosts rose like mist when God tapped it with his silver cane. There were giant cedar trees out front that snapped when we hit them from the porch, jumping like big squirrels from the stone ledge. Inside it had no end; the stairs led to God’s tongue the basement was the warm door to the labyrinth of the Earth. We lived on the rising chest of a star. And on one still day, I hammered a boy until he bled and ran, the blood like red licorice on my small hand. The world became many houses, all of them under siege.

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Lamentations If only my soul were a messy garage outside the house I have always wanted. Then I would be a pile of fenders, old tires and engine parts, carburetors on shelves, wrenches everywhere, buckets of dirty oil, some skeleton of a car in the middle with old lawnmowers. It would be a tinker’s joy, you in the corner there, sitting beside me, the two of us not quite finished, not joined with wires that pull the current around, make the lights go. I could go over to you, shuffle over, step in puddles of grease and grime, follow the squeak of your voice like the up and down of old springs. Putting your parts with my parts, we look like the working thing that we should be. Sputtering, we come to life, and this stumbling mechanic we have been for so long falls into a pile of bolts, wires, nuts, panels, and grease. He sleeps while you and I resurrect him whole and full. Then we die again, fall back into the incompleteness. Back and forth this goes, until in one realization a brand-new car rolls out of the garage. We sit in it, me driving, adjusting the radio, with a license plate saying “Father and Son.”

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W hite Shoes and Swings for Marva

Before my sisters and brother came screaming out of Mama, she used to take me to the swings. I had white shoes from a store that claimed to correct flat feet. The park had trees full of wisdom like the full dresses of women I watched with four-year-old eyes. Swinging easily, back and forth, I trusted Mama not to push me away to someplace where I could not get back to her, where I would be eaten by dark fear. She was young, but I did not understand what it was to have a young mother who didn’t know nothin’ bout raisin’ boys, what boys need. I just knew I had Mama all to myself.

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Hershey’s Chocolate Some nights she would make herself a pan of pure chocolate. By herself she would dip it out with a spoon and eat it like it was a dessert from some fine restaurant. She did it so she could enjoy herself, she said. But when I watched her, something in her made me want to cry. I knew Mama wasn’t just enjoying herself. She was forgetting. It takes growing up to learn to forget, but sometimes all it takes is being a little boy.

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Mt. Zion Baptist for Marlene

Before Grandma couldn’t walk, we all went to church together sometimes. We sat in one little group on the pew like the pictures of black folk on the backs of the fans we used to cool ourselves in the church. Mama wanted me to always do things like they supposed to be done. Her word for right was businessfied. Even now when I am making love, the woman gotta know I’m businessfied. The singing was usually good, and I knew all about this church. I was in Sunday School and on the Junior Usher Board. I went to Baptist Training Union. One Sunday in winter we went to morning service, and I got bored. I was getting to be fifteen, feeling like a man, smelling my pee, as Mama and her sisters called it. So I put my hands behind my head in church and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear that mess the pastor was dragging out himself. We went home and Mama told me to go in the back room and take my clothes off and get ready for a beating. I took off everything except my underwear and waited for her. She came in like the roll of thunder and beat me. I cried the cry of shame. I wanted Daddy

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to come and save me. Mama had gone stone crazy on my behind. When she knew she was dying, Mama apologized to me. It was spring. I was thirty years old.

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The Robe Mama and her sisters were dancing in the living room, cackling, bending the floor. I was downstairs in the tub, scrubbing my knees with Ajax, wondering where the black came from, where it went. I was afraid to cross the living room sea of women with their party, afraid of what I did not know of women, their delight in measuring the sex of naked little boys. They prophesied a boy’s potential to please a woman by studying hairless pricks. Afraid more of being late for bed than of being seen, I put on my yellow robe. I wrapped myself like a fireman about to enter a burning building, and I climbed the stairs where my mother stood with her mischievous smile. I walked into this room of women who loved me, and my mother pulled off my robe for all to see what kind of man I could be. Shame cut me like a cleaver. Once in a nightmare, I saw my mother at the top of the stairs, face raging, hair full like Medusa, daring me to climb, daring me.

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The Dogs You killed the Dalmatian puppy with the wheel of your truck, driving backwards over it until the white with black spots popped in the soft ooze of baby dog. It was a simple and unexpected flop of the wheel, and the children cried, the children of the man who owned the dog, the laziest farmer in Woodstock, the man who let pig shit collect until it was three feet thick and looked like bad deviled eggs. The children carried the dead puppy to ground hallowed enough to wait for those spirits who attend to the soulless, and the truck spattered exhaust and oil on the place where he left this earth as we drove off. In another year, you killed another dog, this time with the shotgun you ordered me to bring to you, and I took his body to the burn pile in a wheelbarrow, watching how the flesh quivered like the soft arm of your wife sleeping in the yellow pickup, riding out to where time is pregnant with surprise.

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The Appaloosa The one horse you gave me you took back when she went insane, when she began to chew wood instead of the expensive grain we bought from the feed store, the grain that had the sweet smell of molasses and was good for even us to chew. She turned into an ugly thing with her wild thoughts, and I forgot about the beauty expected of her when her blanket filled out and complemented her chestnut body and the name the Nez Percé gave her. She rotted and began to stink of promises gone wrong, of gods avenging their defilement. A man who knew what to do with useless horses came and took her away in a wooden trailer she tried to chew, and my tears welled up in huge drops before they splattered on the ground, as I trembled and realized I would have to give up her own ghost for her, ghost which she did not have, ghost which she came here beautifully without.

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A Woman From Fredericksburg for Lenora R. Davis

The blade of the mower sliced your toe on a day otherwise unremarkable, sliced your big toe and sent it bouncing like Marie Antoinette’s head from the heavy, sliding guillotine, painfully like your first daughter who came bright, high, and even. You took your toe with you to the hospital before microsurgery could amend your abrupt amputation, despite your knowledge of medicine that you dispensed on Saturday afternoons. You leaned back against the sink’s counter, smiled so that the mole beneath your eye stood in bold relief, smiled to explain some principle of biochemistry. Impromptu lecturer, you made your mark when you escorted a nephew of your soon-to-be husband to Walter’s Art Gallery in downtown Baltimore, where the wealthy come for lunch, in the midst of the city’s old-world flavor. You took him round and around, waited for his world to open up and admit the light to guide his light, which you suspected burned difficultly inside him. You watched and talked, explained Leonardo da Vinci’s genius, because you knew how much this boy loved machines but also that he had an artist’s sense of the delicate, the frail. Always the talker, always the savant, your voice sang through the garden 28

at cultivation time under the heat. Hoes moved up and down beside you. The horses stood bemused in the shade. You chattered on about classical education, about the strength of black colleges in the South that trained legions of doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers, and consummate intellectuals like you. That one stout and frail nephew worked beside you in near silence, stopped to punctuate your speeches with insight won from his own books, his own private hours of study and reflection, not unlike your beginning. You wore on until it was too hot to work, when the grass let out its shrill mourning in stillness. You trudged up the hill past the old garage which was torn down, on the hilltop where the house stood as sentinel over your Arabian horse farm, and where, years later, the mower took your toe while you were not looking. You thought instead, for one fearful minute, of something else, some other thought that connected to the progression issued from the source of your mind, that invisible point you sought to effect in the young, the faintly promising. You empowered them as makers and healers.

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S cience One day you’ll be a credit to our race. ­—Mrs. Moody

From behind your tableau, Bunsen burners, beakers, test tubes, with the periodic table for mise-en-scène, you measured my light’s luminescence and clarity. You missed the obvious truth. I meditated with reverent eyes on a man descending with open arms and flowing hair and robe from the boisterous beginnings of words. You commanded me to hold a snake. It was a black snake that wriggled like rubber. I prayed for God’s voice to announce an intervention. I thought it would be a still voice like the one to Elijah and Samuel, or like the soothing annunciation. El Shaddai, God of my father, Eli, Eli, Lord of junior high school, rescue me from this snake that slinks and slithers, rescue me from Mrs. Moody’s science class. I prayed before and after every class, to take away this snake that I feared. Eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open, my lips pursued the English of King James. I didn’t understand the sex of it all.

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G oing to Church with C.W. We spellbind like the annunciation. You amble over to your cane, favor the leg that threatens to surrender. I shuffle over to the cordless phone to peek at the red recharge indicator. Two cantankerous supplicants, we head for a New England church, wooden and white, an eightyish white woman with her companion, a thirtyish black man with his diva. We slip through the wet grass to worship. Down the road, Jesus. Down the road to joy. Shadows of the congregations of leaves whip over the car like a lover’s whine. You ask me about the book I manage barely to write, slowly, with pain. You resurrect again your Radcliffe degree in literature, your fondness for Victorian fiction. I remind you of your rude impertinence, how worship blurts out our duty to be meditative, to acknowledge the splendor of the sun’s confident slide over the mountains, of the minute splash of butterflies in the stream. I come Lord, come this way to please you. We waddle into the temple. Floors creak, heads turn, eyes spin, and mouths drop as we go to the front pew. You fix your eyes on your almost century of life, from the roads, the dirt roads before the car to the unmarked highway that leads to the moon. I wonder how long I can stay in your grace, how the separation will wake one sad day, how we will find excuses to hurt each other.

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Through the benediction and the hush, we walk together outside, an unusual machine turning on the pistons of forgiveness and curiosity. Halfway home we stop at a store for ice cream. You blink quickly over the dashboard. I pay for our diversion. The clouds suggest a thunder far away and above us like the noise from flesh’s integration as our hearts circle one another and join. The wind sticks wet lips to us as we drive home to the squeak and creak of the colonial farmhouse, up the winding path along the stone wall. Hold my hand, Father. Hold my hand when I die.

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In C.W.’s Closet I climb the C scale on the old piano. On the third finger, I forget the crossover step like a man forgets a kiss. You chuckle, rupture the stillness of Indian Pond, hustle over to the window, look out over the blueberry field you knew as a child. Then you turn gracefully as someone sixty years younger with the gray hair blond, the brittle frame full with flesh. You turn and beckon me to your closet, to the past. In the personal closet your father stands in photographs where you toddle along, you and Elizabeth at the end of the Gilded Age. She has her gumption, you your willingness to obey the root of the law over our tainted bodies, the blossom of the law over our souls. Your father stands in his rebuke of DuBois, the black rabble-rouser, after the Niagara Falls convention. Disparate fingers were called together before I settled into your domain, a heavy bird with inchoate wings. You pull back and sigh, eye me with the deadlocked desperation we sing when we know the flower must wither, the stone must crumble, the friend must go. We unlock from our fixed gaze on your father in his belief in segregation. We move together into the kitchen, young and old,

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black and white, poor and rich. Our bodies are so close they pattern a rhythm above the evening news with Tom Brokaw, above the world as it wanes, moans. Our breath mingles with the night.

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Dialing for Dollars After the Dialing for Dollars show, and the coffee and conversation with neighbors who knew everything, after the rituals and my mourning, we headed down to the shopping center, you driving the old black car, the one we named like a dog we hoped would one day run away, and in the deadly mundaneness of the shops and the Polish mothers who looked just like you with their acrylic hats, we stopped at the old wishing fountain where I peeped sadly into the water, weighed down by tranquilizers and fear that I would never climb out of this canyon of my own despair, and you told another of your jokes, like your favorite about the parrot, not like the car but like a person, jive hip person that never faltered, and you laughed until your dimples twinkled under the fluorescent light, poking me in my ribs to get me to smile, and I grinned weakly, wanting to crawl inside your arms at twenty-four and start all over again, back to white shoes and formula milk and fairy tales, away from this sense that I had failed in everything.

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A Ma xim for Alya

I was once accused of being a perfectionist. In fact, she said I tried to be too perfect, as if just perfect was not bad enough. I was secretly proud of the perfection of someone who is too perfect. The greater secret was I often felt that I was unfinished, just short of the mark. The mark was always moved by some manipulator. After all, this sacred self, the Hindu brilliant jewel, is so subjective. This person who hung my guilt for all the world to see probably saw in me something she wanted. For us perfect folk, all life coheres. We are secret egotists. We worship curves, the round parts that make life more interesting. The curves are where

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mistakes are taken lightly, taken out of guilt’s crucible. In perfection, the perfect wash themselves in shame, as the brilliant jewel catches me smiling in its perfect mirrors.

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Wood

木

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LIV Cats climbing a steel fence to a garden. The thoughts of humans aching back to the first unfolding of Mind.

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Sears Roebuck for Michele

Mama used the telephone to change her voice. When she ordered something from Sears, she got proper, proper and strange sounding. It wasn’t like Mama to be so fancy ’cause she wasn’t that way around us. I just knew she was talking to a white person ’cause she did the same thing when the insurance man came. She was like an actress, figuring in her head this woman she had to be for a few minutes. I guess she did it right ’cause she took care of all her business. Except it didn’t seem right to me, to be more than one way. Mama loved telephones, and I grew up and found out most women love telephones and talking. Most men don’t have much to say, unless they just bragging and lying. Even then black men don’t change as much as women do most times. Daddy didn’t carry on on the phone like Mama did. Matter of fact, he didn’t have much to say noway. He just sat around and read the paper, but Mama would get on the line and go through a million changes. Still the one that bothered me most was changing up for white folk. I didn’t understand this English, where it came from, where it could go, or how Mama taught me translation. 42

American Income The survey says all groups can make more money if they lose weight except black men . . . men of other colors and women of all colors have more gold, but black men are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales, meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love anymore, gone down inside Earth somewhere where women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.

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F ifteen Years “To be or not to be . . .”

There were worse sentences in life, twenty years just for driving the car, fifteen for manslaughter when you were only settling a grudge, or the bare number caught by necessity when cops drive through a black neighborhood with a hard-on for black men, some cops black themselves and disappointed. So this life was not so bad, I thought at times, the tanks of chemicals, the roar of engines, our worker bodies being misshapen, stretched out past where they should go, despite the strength. We could go longer than we thought at times, working double and triple shifts in the steel mills, our lives lived with coworkers, our families the strangers. Home was not home without some disconnect, something to do when the staring faces we slept with and fed held pointed questions paychecks could not answer. & when a coworker brother died, it was the loss of the breathing beside you, the hand that moved you out of the way of the crane or the sharpened edge of things, the hand that showed you mercy when you could not cry. These things I grieve when I think of this time, this sentence when I had no vision of how to be.

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Baby Boy Baby Boy is a veteran, his bad leg, his paunch are scars. He remembers when South Baltimore was hell and risk for blacks at night; he has rolled the world to snake eyes on the black side of Pigtown bars. Sweat creeps now from fibers of gray hair. He curls his cigarettes from hidden smiles, now that the streets are safe to walk with small .22s and straight razors, now that black folk are not playthings, now that curses come from under breath, as fire snorting from deep down. Baby Boy outstrips the youngsters, loading trucks, soaked in his own water, limping. Now that we don’t have to hold back, Baby Boy goes through Pigtown in a new car, his cap turned sideways and down, for business. Baby Boy is a warrior.

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The Lawn for Sean

Saturdays we took out the push mower, my father in short sleeves with a handkerchief tied around his neck to catch the sweat. He came out after he drank coffee in a kitchen so warm the glossy plaster walls turned slippery. The smell of sausages slithered past our noses in waves. I took his orders, went for the file to sharpen the turnstile of blades that whistled when I gave the mower a push hard enough to spin the cutters. They were like a silver cone spinning. They sometimes caught a bee harvesting and cut his woolly belly. Full registers of bee grief went out through the weeds. A tiny death seized its unconscious prey. My father took the file and eyed it. He played the craftsman, sat on our chair my aunt broke with her quarter ton of love. He sat there half out of it, leaned over to see how best to reach the blade that was dull, the traitor that sat behind the metal bar and only half pretended to cut the grass. The grass with both victim and benefactor of the reaping, of the turning down. The slow screech and scrape of metal on metal hassled the nerves of sparrows on the pole where the clothesline hung from the house to the edge of the alley. There my mother hung the bright whites and frail frill of flowers to dry while she talked to Mrs. Parker or

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to Miss Gladys when Mrs. Parker died. The dreaded drone of the metal sound of death hit and left that house to strangers. When it was done, when the filing of blades left the grim decision to shine so sharp it drew blood, I pushed the mower out. I went onto the lawn and it began to sing. Up and down it sang as it sliced the topmost portion of the grass. It cut the green down so that it seemed every single leaf was the same height, that they could all begin again somehow. My father lit his Winston, flicked his ashes on petunias. My hands toughened on the handle of his mower that sang out endings and beginnings.

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The Poets 1965–1968

In the gymnasium the balls spun from their fingers like spiders’ silk, fine and unconquerable. Legs woven in threads of hope, they jumped, came down on silent sneakers, dashing any hopes we had of winning. They were the blacks, the black blacks who had the advantage of being born. Dunbar, the high school that sent a jingle in a broken tongue to colleges on full scholarships. Dunbar, the high school that we watched march here to smash us once again, we black boys with all these white boys too thick to dance like a knife in the air, to open, cut, slice a tangled history. Breath held back “nigger” in the air over the bleachers. Breath held back “wino junkies” under the old clock over the hollering wooden floor where we sang pep songs in German, peeping inside our shirts and ties at our own magic. The Dunbar Poets made baskets while strolling, dreaming of rivers. “Coach, we can’t do nothing with these darkies from Dunbar. Coach, their bodies ain’t bodies. They are songs from somewhere unfair to us.” We, the black folk at Polytechnic, wished from the white sea of equality that Dunbar would stamp blackness all over this stiff building to save us. 48

The lead opened so wide it was too hard for The Poets to keep from laughing. They slapped their hands and did the slow jazz of black boys walking away from an easy game. In the streets, we watched them stride away in Florsheims to get high, too brilliant to live, too brilliant to die.

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The Southpaw The fist is a hand that has made decisions. It has sat on a rock holding its thoughts over the edge of a lake, weighing this, weighing that. It has paced through woods in autumn, kicking leaves over matters philosophical and literary. It has thought. It has prayed to a God who knows hands and what hands can do in a malleable world. The sixteen-ounce boxing glove is a fist that never unfurls. Inside it, your hand is forced to conclusions. The glove magnifies the hand and softens it. It makes a fist that is both dangerous and heavy to haul and throw. It protects and threatens. It is like the black flash across space to the face like a lightning bolt burnt with voltage. In the barracks we fought for pride. A pound here, a pound there, we battled for the turf of striding out in the sun smiling. I fought a boy from Kentucky who kept a picture of his Plymouth Roadrunner on his locker. I had nothing against him except he thought he could beat me. He hit me out of Louisville with a left. The eye makes stars when the fist pushes it into the skull socket. A fraction of a second and you are blind,grasping around for focus. I stood away, arched my back, flipped my head to rattle him with glove and grit from a right. He sat and said, “I’ve had it. No more.” Hands can break bodies—bone on bone.

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R ambling in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary

In general population, census is consensus—ain’t nowhere to run to in these walls, walls like a mind— We visitors stand in a yellow circle so the tower can frisk us with light, finger the barrels on thirsty rifles. I got rambling, rambling on my mind In general population, madness runs swift through the river changing, changing in hearts, men tacked in their chairs, resigned to hope we weave into air, talking this and talking that and one brutha asks Tell us how to get these things They got, these houses, these cars. We want the real revolution. Things . . . I got rambling, got rambling on my mind In the yellow circle the night stops like a boy shot running from a Ruger 9mm carrying .44 magnum shells, a sista crying in the glass booth to love’s law, to violence of backs bent over to the raw libido of men, cracking, cracking, crack . . . I got rambling, rambling on my mind

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My Father’s First Baseball Game for David

You lumbered along the stadium like a sinner being marshaled to baptism, your head high and certain of convictions, the busy chatter of the crowd beside you. The radio is better, you declared, and baseball is baseball regardless. The wooden seat held you erect and mute, glancing at the tiny figures in the field. The open wealth of your first live game came at you singly as the Negro Leagues came up, as you spoke of Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, and your ancient radio. After the ninth, you fought the crowd, fingering the ticket subs in your shirt, as we floated out into the night with the deep river of white faces.

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The Final Tr ains of August for Michael S. Harper

He stands in the unfinished door of his antique shop, above Bar Harbor. He leans on the sill to relieve his trick knees, watches the final trains of August, vacationers with their bicycles on the tops of RVs and minivans, teenagers with their feet propped in the window. They mimic some abandon coined a long way off. He counts the possible customers, the accountants from Boston with their neat wives who move through his collection smug and sure, like necromancers who make money out of the sagacious purchase, or the infrequent Southerners who betray summers of the South for the cool nights and mountains of Maine with its wilderness and its infinite lay of lakes. He watches and imagines what stragglers will land in his world of sundry history. “I want a window,” she says, and Walter announces himself. He holds out his pearl-white beard, “Walter Francis, retired colonel and antique trader at your service.” “I want a window,” she repeats. He takes her into the basement, past some yellow Jehovah’s Witness

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books spread in a basket, past the collection of chairs where people had their breakfast or where they watched the chill of autumn come in with full colors. They move past tables where folks served tea to neighbors who passed time with grace, past the baby scale where doctors held protesting children to see how much they had grown back before the electronic scale and Similac. They reach the old windows. Her face breaks open and brightens. “Where is this from, what time, what house?” She presses her palm to a pane. “Ma’am, I get these windows from all over this region and beyond.” She persists, prodding on, “What house, what house is this?” He pulls the suspenders holding him, “Ma’am, this was a quiet house, off to itself, where the rain beat like light fingers on a drum.” She takes it quickly, writes the check in tight, even letters, announces that she is an artist. Walter lights a Marlboro. “I get them all,” he muses, “everybody comes to Walter Francis.” “Gertrude and I built this place,” he tells a couple from Hartford. Gertrude walks across the road.

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“She runs the motel and I run this fabulous collection of the old.” Gertrude reaches them, moves as easy as a teenager with legs long and supple as they were when she was an Air Force lieutenant to Walter’s Vietnam colonel. They believed that nothing but the end could stop them, the end that comes to all of us, and to everything we own, the end that falls to the caring hands of angels and preservationists. She reaches them, speaks loudly, “Walter, I’m gonna unload that truck. It’ll be dark soon, too dark to work.” He growls softly, “Gertrude, get on back to the motel. Go on.” She ignores him, moves to the truck, tosses in the new antiques like a stevedore, things new to this way station of the old but unforgotten. “That woman thinks she’s my boss, after I took this business to be rid of the overseers, the judges.” The young couple ponders a relay box from the 1880s, precisely kept in a wooden cabinet, polished, tightened, and smoothed. They decline and move out into the brisk air of the evening, to make the night drive to Hartford.

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The last stranger fills the threshold, a young man who travels alone. He is up from Providence to see the mountain of the Roosevelts, Cadillac Mountain, where FDR came to forget the weight of guiding America. The stranger considers buying an old-fashioned life preserver made of tamarack wood. Walter takes his cue to land a lecture on the origin of his house, built in the eighteenth century by a man who built frigates and schooners for a living. Walter explains the house is a seagoing vessel, tight and solid. He could lift it and move it today and not even disturb it. The nursery floor is tamarack because that kept life’s noise at bay. The house has outlived endings. The stranger pushes his fingers into the night air, marvels at the stars. Walter reminisces about the Orient where he wondered if adventure lay in what the dead leave behind. In the sick humidity of Vietnam, he made a regular route to our last heralded door and stopped just short of hearing the answers. The stranger from Providence coughs to break the meditation and then climbs roughly into an old Chevrolet with scabs of rust. He drives away toward the ocean.

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Walter hobbles on his trick knees, turns off the lights, closes down the shop with its unfinished walls. At the road’s edge, he lights a Marlboro, blows the smoke ahead, walks into it, as he listens to the regrets of the dead.

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The Picnic, an Homage to Civil Rights We spread torn quilts and blankets, mashing the grass under us until it was hard, piled the baskets of steamed crabs by the trees in columns that hid the trunk, put our coolers of soda pop on the edges to mark the encampment, like gypsies settling in for revelry in a forest in Romania or pioneers blazing through the land of the Sioux, the Apache, and the Arapaho, looking guardedly over our perimeters for poachers or the curious noses of fat women ambling past on the backs of their shoes. The sun crashed through the trees, tumbling down and splattering in shadows on the baseball diamond like mashed bananas. We hunted for wild animals in the clumps of forests, fried hot dogs until the odor turned solid in our nostrils like wood. We were in the park. One uncle talked incessantly, because he knew the universe; another was the griot who stomped his foot in syncopation to call the details from the base of his mind; another was a cynic who doubted everything, toasting everyone around with gin. The patriarchal council mumbled on, while the women took the evening to tune their hearts to the slow air and buzzing flies, to hold their hands out so angels could stand in their palms and give dispensation, as we played a rough game of softball in the diamond with borrowed gloves, singing Chuck Berry and Chubby Checker,

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diving in long lines into the public pool, throwing empty peanut shells to the lion, buying cotton candy in the aviary of the old mansion, laughing at monkeys, running open-mouthed and full in the heat until our smell was pungent and natural, while the sun made our fathers and uncles fall down in naps on their wives’ laps, and we frolicked like wealthy children on an English estate, as reluctant laws and bloodied heads tacked God’s theses on wooden doors, guaranteed the canopy of the firmament above us.

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Thelonious for Gene F. Thomas

It’s as if you are given the sky to carry, lift it on your shoulders and take it to lunch, sit in McDonald’s with it weighing you down, this business of being black, of staying black until the darkness of some eternity kisses you. Birth gives you something other folk thank God for not having, or else they pray for it, to have its gift of a body inclined to touch, inclined to sing. Yet they will not give back to God the paleness of being able to touch absolute power. They envy only for so long, as being black is being bound to danger. Among us there are masters like Monk, who understood the left hand stride on a brick. In his rapturous dance beside the piano, he was connected to knowing the scratch and slide of the shoes leaving the ground, the shoes of the lynched men. He carried this thing that we are, as the mystic he was, reveling in its magic, respectful of its anger, mute and unchanged as the hate and envy surround us. One day we learn there is no sky above this trapped air around the earth. The sky is but a puff of smoke from this giant head smoking a Lucky Strike, pretending not to know the truths. We learn sometimes in this life, sometimes in what comes after, where there is really nothing but everything we never knew. We learn in silence

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the dance Monk knew. We find secrets for pulling the million arrows from our souls each time we move to sleep, to forget that we are both jewel and jetsam, wanted and unforgiven.

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The Last Jazz Club In a sprite room with flight in the ceiling, the zippered white Bible with illustrations. The correct way to walk is to pass time (2/4) with some sort of affectation, being cool, infused with the Mary Jane wrappers. In barbershops wrapped in do-rags, the shawls of mercy. I am in the last measure and can’t reach the chord. Left hand, please obey the sermons . . . Black Harry Measure to measure, vinegar over pig entrails, ascension and transcendence in pots over centuries. Rush into the willing loss of memory, paint peeling down to los cucarachas. Where are the saints? “This is not the most appealing source of gift-giving,” they say after the fact of emptiness, lacing their Stacy Adamses. “How come y’all ain’t got no sense of demarcation,” they ask from the hollow of the unwritten score, as if Lester knew this would happen. They rush over to a Tupac grave that is unmarked, count the gray in their hair, lift a leg with a hand to do the hip’s hop. Lost in the cemetery, the graves rise into the combos of hundreds of Billie Holidays backed by a nameless ache, silence rising like lilies of night mist. It is a congregation of damned discord, disagreements fly into the mouth of a white robe over Peter, denying the discord. Remove the discord and it shall be born

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Be an a cappella saxophone, a horn without a horn, da  ba   dada     dede       BOO! Was it Hopalong Cassidy, or was it Roy Rogers? In the kitchen with Mama stealing my cornflakes . . . Notes from a summer clarinet, a deflated football, the outside trees at Christmas before drive-ins drove by, believing the celluloid, while the celluloid believes. Ahem, ahem, Borders will be established along the terrain of cities to be discussed in the margin notes written in the after train of blue coffee mugs above national discrepancies, no more territories in heaven, no Harlem, no South Central, no South Side, no Baltimore, no D.C., the Dutiful Colored.              Borders will be established. Be established, damn it! A hem, ahem. Washing cars in the suds in the sun, feeling the flesh of metal softening to kisses, scrubbing the tires white over the black, lifting an eye to the text in the sun, the text!  ouglass on the sorrow songs, D Du Bois on his two minds, Garvey on the ships, Nkrumah on our mind, Rochester on diplomacy . . . Be an a cappella trumpet, tap out courage in segregation, 63

dignity in the bull’s rush. The army jeeps in my breakfast, green everywhere on my scrapple and eggs, the big dogs, the wolfbears in deep bass barking under Grandma’s knitting by the window. This is more than Bonanza on Sunday nights with Lil Joe & Hoss. I sang to old jazz albums I didn’t understand because the people who gave them to us were rich white folk who don’t know why bebop went cool or why cool went. Will I ever understand? Why do narcissists posit themselves as positive? the conscious ones I am impervious to clarity. It hurts. Listen now to Kirkatron. The ’64 Chevy Super Sport is the best Super Sport. Pump it up on air shocks, bounce it on down, down. Candy-apple red is my favorite color, rebellion in tint. In the Cordon Bleu, “Crackers, anyone?” There are black crackers, full of holes in the soles of ghosts running in swamps, on their naked dogs from the dogs. Do you understand amour, its paucity? Where is my bullets? I’m gonna shoot some spooks in white sheets singing hymns to themselves, evil of evil preaching.            The verse, son, the verse! Thou shalt love thy god . . . Miracle workers, name thy gods, please? 64

me    do    re me    me    me me    me    me we/me/we night unto night !

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Composition for White Critics Who Think African-American Poets Cannot Work in Contexts of Pure Concerns for Language and Post-Postmodern Twenty-first Century Inventiveness in Lyric Expression Due to Their Self-Limiting Concerns with Language as a Means of Self-Expression and R acial/Cultur al Identity in Poetry That Is Ultimately Perhaps Beautiful However Too Trite and Too Folksy to Be Post [//] Theorist Efficacy In laptops on commuter flights, prop jets and peanuts with soda, considering the last fate of this turning in the gyre, turning, turning down the withering task of tunnels of white rabbits with watches like Flavor Flav, get out of here Flavor Flav blues ripping over the precipice of an amanuensis turning into an insect crab creeping into the crescendo of hollering arias in Verdi’s Porgy & Bess, I see you now. It is time for coffee. Give me the complexity of knowing, the gratitude of waking and wondering which window to thank for apples in the window, becoming more red, redder than candy-apple red, a cosmic significance of not ever having a childhood and realizing how such burdens as being less than an adult require the synthesis of forms, of flow charts                           of Lotus spreadsheets, a sexual arrangement in Tibet     I greet you now, after this long trek to this point, this grove of pointed hedges where all time changes and you gain or you lose or you understand there is no death, only a perception of what it means to not breathe, this timeliness of looking back some four hundred years and figuring the power of being able

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to tell some gross lie and call it history, hoping the profit will land you a patio overlooking some wave crashing in on a commercial for the Caribbean. Metal lands in the crevice of cradles. What matters is this waving, weaving of textures of night sky floating over the stars, as in a night before a day of raining when you can look out a nd see the gloom to fall on all you had hoped to do, accomplishing little, a s who will ever know we were here if everyone falls asleep at the machine, just before the self-conscious narrative awakens and slaps your grandma into some bootleg distillery during the casting/cattle and you awaken understanding nothing except thighs on the throne in the basement, the admonition fathers give you of being kind to the dumb poor, as the poor are all dumb— Listen, it’s Falstaff running in the accounting. What now, Caliban, in your old Chevrolet Impala, leaping over the Wall Street disclosures and closures over any hope you ever had of ascending to the lyceum of Tootsie Rolls, washing the hands of your dreams in bleach and dishwashing liquid, oh what could be more tragic than dirty beans and rice, the melting of the sauce turning to some letting out of blood, away from the necessary folk richness of fables, Pitchy Patch Man running alongside Cuchulain, Kingston in the lurches, busy Mennonite women making shoofly pie in the afternoon windows, in black arrangements, some Haitian cherub peeping in through the gesticulating head of graffiti on the walls, cross, crisscross, cross Bronx expressway, the way you wear

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your clothes backwards, dirt in the bloody beans and rice, & from the Isles, screech Charlie Parker, screech, screech and in the cruelest month take tea with the man in green makeup, leaning over the bank ledge to creditors and robbers. In a negro bar, the negro says “Aren’t we all Sicilians here?” & we must get home by seven as Elaine and Bobbie must get to their archery lessons, and the dogs must get their shots, and the utility vehicle needs another manicure, in the shadows of the lilacs in the last door—oh dear, did we thaw the roast on the train up the Mississippi to some distant point, a fading spot in the darkening window where we will be held forever and forever, tasting the harvest of tea leaves handed to us one day at a time, with slices of banana bread, reading Trollope, oh god, the torture of details in British. “I want to know,” said some minister arraigned before God on a Tuesday when every available angelic public defender was out somewhere being laid, out in the sun, so close and not melting, as we watch the butter churn in the bowl and melt for homemade pound cake, having heard the announcement about the end of downtowns, now centers with no cartography, and we add raisins, peeping into the bowl, ready to put it in the Mixmaster to swirl along with the flour. “I can’t imagine a world without me,” said the reader in the reading room, safely ensconced in words that are capable at any time of absolute and murderous rebellion, leaping off the shelves, abandoning syntax and punctuation, leaving off sound to become “Now, Tommy, stop stabbing the dog” bigger than “V” destroyed the planet we wasted before they threw us here to Earth the virtual entertainment, chewing Big Red. Anyone for Big Red? The first four notes

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of Dizzy’s Blues, please, in the software, message returned to archives your mailbox is empty The first four notes of Dizzy’s Blues, please, random play this time this time O  ne            Two                Three                   Four 4/4 time       wide angle sweet   fire   bird  suite

America oh my poetry America Fade to palm trees in Los Angeles That’s the Wrap, Boys. Let’s call it a movie.

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S am’s Teacher, why the silence? for Major Jackson

I buy my root beer with two hands full of nickels and dimes. Walking over in my sweatpants, the coins felt like a pimple big as a grapefruit, full of silver juice. There are stars out tonight. The moon is shaving the man’s face. He is looking up at the first floor/menswear of the universe. Sam’s is in the basement of the universe, so Sam’s dog is dying slowly, and there are many murders on the weekend. The fog is waiting for the messiah to arrive like spring, quite suddenly and above the need left by the slush of winter. Oh, it is winter in our hearts after all. I put all my nickels and dimes on the counter, a thousand little clangs and bangs. The clerk looks at me. I look at the clerk. It might be more beautiful if my coins were beads and I wore them in necklaces. Money would grow in virtue. Buying a house would mean spending months hauling beads to the bank. Friends and relatives would walk in long trains bearing beads. There would be festivals for bead trains. The city would stop. Beads would be served. The clerk counts coins till he’s bored. He scoops them in his hand, smiles. It is time to go. Maybe I gave

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too much money, but I don’t want to count. It is enough work to see. I walk home, and I see all the faces, faces of lit rooms faces of the trees, faces of the street faces of the dogs.

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Z ombie Dance, Tapping the Bloodroot for Katrina

1 Buddy Bolden speaks from the insane asylum It don’t go that way, upside the wall, down to the woodwork, falling all over where the wood in the floor breaks off from the C note. It’s more like this, the way I lean up under the last star on Orion in the first break of spring, under the catcalls of mockingbirds, the belly grunts of air knotted up inside me. Like it was this morning, the sheets full of years of me, the dipper back down in the bucket to wash my dreams until they make sense. Marie Laveau or her familiar comes back again, a voice with no body. Then the roar from the hoodoo and gooba dust, the hammer nailed to the tree on a piece of cloth with dry blood, the valley of full moons like a python belly writhing, full of some still living thing. Jazz, make the water one tongue, rise up, rise up, soprano sorceress, sing to the ancient pain all around me, the chorus of how time began. O water . . . breathe, so the dead can listen.

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2 Children in superdomes . . . This old lady’s hand is weaker than mine, and I ain’t used to so many people close to breaking, and everybody is so wet. When I look back to where we used to live, all I see is the way water stand up and be talking to you, stand up like it can dance all over the world. It’s so much stuff in here, and I am just a little girl trying to help this white lady in this wheelchair of hers. People get so loud in here I can’t hear myself. Tonight, when I go to sleep, I’m gonna count all the things I remember that we had and hope my sister bring them when she come back. She better come back. I am gonna count my handmade dolls the Vietnam lady gave me, plus all the books I had about dolphins because they are the best. Then I’ll be sleepy and won’t hear nobody crying in here where everything is all piled up, like we all finished and there ain’t nothing else to do . . . forever.

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Fire

火

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LXIII The eighth light bonds the opposing wills of love. Light must endure light.

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My Heart for Laurie A. Schmidt

If ever they trace the lines of my chest with ink as you traced them with your tongue, kiss me first. Hold my tongue to yours, pull it until it goes numb. Paste your lips to mine until I can taste your birth. If ever they open me and the bluebirds come rushing out, I want to hear you sing in the flutter of wings. This is the way things are healed. This is how the tired travelers gaze into the eye to be sustained. And when the blood goes rushing away from me like children who have opened a forbidden spout, touch something of mine. Hold me that way to know that I want to hold you more than life itself, but a choice must be made. Some vinegar must go where agony cries out already, enough. I hang in the tiny crochet in feeble hands, as they give me a stranger’s heart. If all of this is just a dream, and you fly away from me before the gray takes over, I will touch you everywhere I go. I will declare the world your body and christen our children in the air of names.

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Tuna Fish for Lucille Clifton

Every day tuna fish, in every conceivable manner. With tomatoes that leaked and made the bread soggy, with lettuce my mother tore in odd shapes that hung like ornaments from my mouth in the cafeteria, the high court. I had tuna on toast toasted lightly that was death-cold at noon, on toast toasted darkly that crumbled like old ruins just when I was in front of LaRue Ashe. She always wanted to kiss me long before I knew why she was so proud of the French in her name. .

Tuna in waxed paper that tore and fell on the floor, tuna in aluminum foil shaped like flying saucers that we threw at each other in assassination attempts, tuna from brand names, StarKist that always rejected hip Charlie in the sunglasses, BumbleBee with its oxymoron soul of insects and fish. Tuna made the day before, which seemed to smell truly like dead fish, the dead fish

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killed by pollution and washed up like rejected never-to-be’s, the dead fish of hot sun. And nothing was so obviously poor as eating this when other kids had hot spaghetti from the kitchen where women like my mother labored over shiny pots and steam. Nothing was so distinctly humble as munching tuna and mayo when LaRue Ashe mounted the bench of the table like the acrobat she was and asked aggressively for a kiss. I sat as stupid as a confused cat, blinked, masticated the sea’s journeyman, bemoaned my banal lunch, but dreaded the deeper pit of despair, tuna’s alter ego, bologna. I knew full well and grievously that LaRue could never come to view bologna as romantic. I knew perhaps unconsciously that few meats are as seductive as fish.

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Sub Shop Girl for James “Eddie” Mann

She is lovely. Her eyes are big almonds floating over the electronic cash register. She puts magic dust in my mayonnaise, hoochie-koochie notes in my fries. There is no other reason to order tomatoes, lettuce, hot peppers, onions, and French fries in a suit and tie. I come nearer the shop tiptoeing in Florsheims. With a quarter I set the mood on the jukebox. “What do you want today?” she asks, “What is it, baby?” I am probably the only man who puts strategy in a Saturday night foray to the sub shop. I line my cologne up carefully on the dresser, the Parisian designer bottle for cheesesteak, for pizza the cheaper, less subtle aromas, laying my clothes out to match each meal. She puts the change in my palm a coin at a time, measuring the contours of the lines in my hands. I think I lost my sanity a long time ago on the way to buy a foot-long and fries. The essence of Sango fires my red urge longing to meld with the small greasy apron that throws frozen steak portions with expertise. How could the heavens have wasted such youth on me and this corner sub shop and vagrants and the empty neon in after-hours streets, and the music from old Smokey Robinson 45s I play on my boom box the nights I want to serenade? Have you ever listed the extras on a cold cut with “Tracks of My Tears” or “Second That Emotion”? When the shop is closed some Sundays I melt in the afternoon apparitions in the empty windows, the deserted counters, the cold ovens, the silence. 81

There are blessings for noble spirits confined to ordinary lives, the dribble of an oba like me and a great spirit like my sub shop Osun slicing pickles. There are blessings as we dazzle the ordinary universe, pervert the threadbare perceptions of doldrums with our elegant affair at night, our perfect love, me in an all-leather racing jacket and Gucci loafers. One night after work I’ll coax her and we’ll pretend to be Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in the parking lot. I’ll caress her around the waist and spin her softly. A dark night sky laden with stars will crack, the moon will pour love’s essence on the earth, truth will overcome us on the voices of the orishas— “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing Baby,” or maybe “You’re All I Need to Get By,” but most of all the song the world needs to hear—“You Ain’t Living Till You’re Lovin.” I am probably the only man who sees the answer in a cheesesteak hoagie with all the fixins and fries, music from my boom box or the jukebox nearby, two almond eyes as deep as canyons over the counter, and my Gucci and Florsheim shoes doing a soft tap, the mania and danger of an insecure world hanging out like a florid design in the curtain of the night.

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Reunions for Aissatou Mijiza Weaver

The pigeons were mock travelers. They popped their staccato heads across the wooden station floor as the Amtrak workers studied donuts and cooling cups of coffee with cream. I took the lower level walkway to where the train from New York stops, across the creaking, old plans of the floor that is now the basement of a condominium for Bostonians who can’t afford Boston. The train slid in on its slow electric, and you stepped down, smiling, inviting me to the meticulous pluck of the soul against its own bone, the confessions of how much we missed each other and why we even allowed this distance and this travel. Why did we come to this? Why did we wait for reunions in the company of strangers? Why did we travel on trains into the horizon’s gift to coveting, to sadness? You always packed your entire life when you went away for a weekend, and I struggled with your bags to the car. I pointed out the downtown of Providence. It is a short scat in a love song that old men from Portugal croon, that old women from Cape Verde whisper, that children from Puerto Rico sing in games. You ignored it all and asked me to kiss you out where no one sees or cares except the awkward sense of history, of slaves old man Brown bought and sold as fortune and left in the form of some legal deed 83

to a parcel of earth. Human life is nothing if it can’t be translated into legal concepts with a map inscribed with borders taken from your dreams. So say the powerful, I explained. You pulled a gift from your bag, a teddy bear. I was instantly figured over with lines, like Gulliver in Lilliput, your love having converted itself to a million pygmies. For two days we went on this way. I entertained the thought of freedom, and you held me, secure in your power, satisfied to allow me the mobility of being led around like the giant on the cart. You watched the loose eyes of women young enough to be my daughters but old enough to promise to restore my slowly vanishing youth. Innocent, I seemed to enrage you. Guilty, I seemed to be as women think men should be, lusty enough to leave, but content enough with their beauty to succumb. The problem with Providence for us was that there was too much beauty, and too much of it in love with tragedy. A man like me could escape there from the truth of himself he has won from a lifetime of handling the hosts behind the eye, behind the thought, where he is embattled by ideas of life’s limits. When it was time to undo ourselves from each other, we half apologized

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for screaming at each other in the shower. We agreed it was great to be able to touch once again. Together we thought wordless thoughts of how separation can stifle a thing like we had or have become.

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P MS We walk on a path of knives to the stone that is your foundation. It is in a swamp where your fears hang like moss. Snakes slide through tears that have lain there gathering. The rains come every month with thunder that makes your head rattle and break open. It is then that we enter. I hold a light and take your hand in mine. Each step is like both giving up and trying again. Each step opens wounds that bleed in streams of bats squeaking out of us. At the stone there is an inscription in the hand of a woman now long gone. Off the knives, we take the wooden walkway to see the stone. It turns to fire, the words blazing like faces. I have to pull you closer. Only you understand the words here under the cry of predatory birds, where the air is humid with blood. The sky flips yellow and then rumbles into black. I tell you our time is nearly gone, and you cry on your knees. At last I do what I am always forced to do. I pick you up and throw you into the water. You explode into a giant flower with purple petals and gold stems. You are you again. The swamp dries to a spring forest where the stone is a fountain. Our feet forget the knives in your heart.

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An Elegy for Lorr aine Hansberry es el dia de los muertes

The chairs are heavy and full with bodies planted in the afternoon, and I stand on cautious pain with a leg that has gone to sleep. I am listening to the cool fire of Latino jazz. Here in Brooklyn Sundays are the mesh of memory, the threads of what has been and what is not winding and weaving until you are driven out, summoned by days as perfect as the absence of love or as the thin heart of space. When I think of you I think, without vision, of your achievement, the little victories I can only assume, lovers forgiven, contracts broken, dreams cast back to their embroidered beds. When I think of you I think of Chicago, how Diana Sands draws her defiant Beneatha there in all her magnificent lack of fire, how in Chicago you grew into a woman. When I think of you, the player on the congas conjures the red and brown flesh on the body of spring, and a little boy drops his ice cream in his mother’s lap, as she smiles, scolding him with the satisfaction of having left earth and time for an afternoon at the Brooklyn Museum, as if there are no souls, as if there is no heaven, as if she breathes performance’s truth. 87

The concert is over, and this moment reveals a secret of itself. I take the elevator back to the paintings and installations from Mexico and beyond. In an altar’s embrace I see Frida Kahlo staring soberly from the grave saying “The sculptor is lost in image, and the composer is lost in sound. Death is an hijo de su chingada madre. Death is a son of a bitch.” In an instant’s desire for you, something knocks my bloody heart to the floor, and I wait for my heart to figure the mask of what has never been. In the midst of the exhibit, where no one can dare to see, I take your canonized head to my chest, see your eyes I never saw, kiss your lips I never kissed, and fall with you into life’s long, echoing call for an author, as our black and velvet curtain falls.

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F riendship, 1994 Companion friends love each other. —Laurence Thomas

I stayed away for two months, caught up in myself, wondering if we were friends. The day I came back Sango was making thunder over us. I could see myself in things I mailed to you. We walked to Mitali’s. I followed, afraid of my anger and yours. In the rain, stepping sideways, we went for another Indian lunch. I was beginning to see my love was my first love rising again from its grave. With a doggy bag, we walked to Sixth Avenue, went over reviews of Alma’s Rainbow, your film. We parted, you with the food, your feet in black sneakers. At Penn Station I got lost in the chatter of commuters. I grabbed my New York Post for the gossip, bought a bottle of water. It wasn’t my grief, my offering of gifts to you, Osun, to set your soul aflame. No, my loneliness was all over me, a new temple over this body, my own demons. Train stations are where I feel the exchange of life’s weight, spirit to spirit. Time has a gift that is not time. 89

House Tr aining Every Saturday morning, I got up before everybody else, everybody except her. She always had one eye open. With my bucket and my rags, I cleaned the kitchen and the rest of the basement, scrubbing the yellow walls that are still yellow after forty years. Scraping and rubbing, I got the black-and-white kitchen floor so bright the tiles shined when I put on the liquid wax. I had the bathroom looking like a picture. Mama was proud of me, and she talked with her sisters about how nice I did everything. I could cook. I could wash clothes and iron, too. One day one of Mama’s sisters said, “Michael sure will make some girl a mighty fine husband, mighty fine.” Only God and Mama knew the truth— Mama was preparing me to be alone.

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Adam and Eve The serpent had an agent, a tiny stag with a bird perched on antlers that shone like silver, suggesting flight to Eve, soaring above the tree with its blue leaves, going into the giant bass of God. Adam was proud of his wife and the tree, admiring the gesticulating trunk, laughing at the snake, who danced like a drunken emperor. Before the fruit, they held knowledge suspect, with no sense of the one truth— life’s prescience, the path to timelessness. Eve wept at the beauty of faces in shadows.

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The Model Sometimes I would seek laughter in a rock; the turn of a lizard in shadow was gorgeous, populations and Gorgons moved in clouds; a sudden alto phrase came out of a brick, moments in the road spoke to me in passionate Russian that evoked Pushkin; I would make it rain and suddenly there was the anguish of the theater, as I made the synagogue bend in the shower; birds danced on a plateau of spiraling air like my sisters in their stocking feet, my roads were long and lethargic like Tolstoy; so the world convulsed, heaved, and told itself, while I painted it from my mirror.

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Lovers with Flowers Can you contain my most intimate whisper, settle it down after it has entered you, make it a part of you and still cling to my hand as gently as your eyes hold me? Something must protect our weakness, our mortality, and I choose the petal and the leaf for their own transience, as life is emboldened by mortal fear. In this light through this glass and wood, I sleep confidently in your murmurs and dreams, deaf to significance, delighting in our petty island of flowers and silences. You have turned my soul to blazing pith.

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Self-Portr ait I see myself in the shadows of a leaf compressed to the green blades growing to a point like the shards of miles of mirrors falling and cracking to perfect gardens. I never inspect the withered assumption of my face’s petty dialogue in raindrops, the deceptive spreading of the words oozing from the skin to the edges of water etched on the ground by gravity and wishing. Passing for the seriousness of my eye, platitudes of my white collar or the perfect posture of my lips, it skirts from the leaves of the plant hiding me and sits stoic like stone in my pupil, mute and unassuming, like Rashi. To gather myself I will swim naked in the wind, bending my blind elbows in circles, stopping now to dance like the cherubim gold on the ark, and gather myself from the particles of this excitement another structure, one closely resembling the beginning.

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S olitude Alone I meditate on the invisible, the potentially beautiful and minute chasms of meaning that divide me and God, the trailing words from his mouth whose echoes taunt me with suggestions of the Oral Torah, the grand perfection before the first droplet of water, or the setting of the first grain of sand. Inside I listen for him to enter me, to flow into this infinite cavern of my heart and help me know this quiet village behind me and the solitary angel above, as other sanctities beg in my shadow, offering foreign altars and hymns.

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The Path at He Nan Temple

Without my umbrella I forget the rain, welcome each drop to forget me. The stones take more time to know, their separate grooves and slopes, different slanting into the light, one face for the moon, one face for the clouds. In the wetness I hear honeysuckles tipping over at the edges, a frog jumping to reach the higher grass, lost somehow. At the end I put my hand out to touch what you left for me the last time I came searching, alone. With the umbrella I stumble into the solitary way water soaks the skin in the thunder, listening for the sound of the eagles circling above the lost piglets of wild boars or whatever can be caught in the talons. My hands are not free, too busy with trying to keep the cover on my head. The stones speak another meditation, a kind of counting to music. Touch us, they say, and a thousand stone paths will appear. Once in the night when it was dry, when the rain stopped its pretty lisping, wetting the air, I walked this path to the dream of where we live.

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D aMo Before the Wall 達摩

After the first thousand days, fractures running like nameless lovers go full and vibrant in the afternoon, tall women dancing down from clouds with trails of lace. He tips his ear to invisible sobs working in gray indentations, a woman’s protestation or her grief— he shudders in his faded robe, his ears no longer tuned to a woman’s voice. It was spring inside a house where the colors rippled under the curtains twirling; she brought him his cooked meat and a prophecy on a tray painted with gold birds. They made love past the hour of the cock. Now he clings to his body and the wall, with one silk nerve cast in silence.

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Earth

土

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XXIX Every organization of thought is a city.

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Borders I have seen lines on a paper turn four-lane highways to roads snaking through clusters of pine, raise foot-high grass in medians, pull the tongues of people to a drawl, tighten the air and fill it with honey, put the hands of women on their hips, stand them in peanut fields with straw hats, slow the paces of men to a crawl and sit them on the gas pumps of one-room stores, scratch belligerence in the eyes of whites. I have gone south in summer nights, watching the sun rise haughty and oppressive. I have felt God tinker with man’s differences, moving through our quartered spaces, making strangers of the same flesh and blood.

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Water Song In the house that has died, the dead come down wooden stairs at noon, puffing the cotton curtains, a cramped bunch of light pressing down, step by step, burning, stopping at the dining room, sitting on plastic table covers, circling the window, then they jet through the empty mansion chasing each other, embracing the empty space where Granddaddy’s picture was kept until the fall from grace, the deaths in the water, the water of the lake all around the house, holding the life still there at siege, jealous mirrors bobbing on small waves that swallow and fill the lungs with screaming. No man knows his time, but his time is appointed. The slipshod mules with box heads and flies, collar and reins worn to brown frazzle and fiber, darkened and hardened corn scattered in feed bins, an empty smokehouse with padlock opened and rusted, covered outhouse dumps sinking, the old house flapping its open door back and forth admitting, garden patch aside going broke under weeds and snakes, the back porch where we bathed and pinched the girls, a Victorian mansion of wood and tin and screens, its skin thinning, its bones going hollow and ashen, its mind blossoming out and over the farm, growing. Down the path behind the corncrib there is still the crack of bushes beneath his feet, fallen pine branches snapping under the crush of his hands, the restless moan of the mules bemoaning his call, his call away, the intonation of angels in his ears, coming down to turn the home into an ugly wailing, there is still the flailing of arms in lake water, armies of people in the abandoned home, discarnate. 103

The dead come back to old folk in the country to talk. An empty swirl of leaves, empty but for the ghosts, has fallen in through the window, swirling on the floor, bronze, yellow-gold, black, crisp as paper, popping up and down on gray, painted floors, the lives take hold and breath in the decay, traveling down the hallway where Grandma slept, gushed by sudden air into the living room where summer visitors from up north slept and whispered, back into the kitchen against the hard iron legs of the stove, they dance and shout echoes, a shudder in the house and they are gone back, following evening rays back to the sun, sucking back to the moon at night, instant glitter on the roof, then nothing but dull tin and the evening gossip of angels when the lake slaps a wet tongue on muddy banks and steep falls. In the twinkling of an eye, in the twinkling of an eye. Homemade brooms of straw, bundles wrapped in twine, skirting the wooden floor, scraping the rough finish, hands dipped into white, metal washbasins, cupped in prayer, rubbing against faces grimy with oil, headless chickens tied to upturned poles, flapping their wings in anger, feathers filling the yard, hogs grunting over slop, sleeping in their food, a pair of hands operating the udder of the cow, raw milk spraying against the bucket in squirts, bowl upon bowl of hot vegetables toted to the table, potbellied stove churning an inferno of wood, in the house that has died and is decaying, there is laughter, prayer, singing, cursing, the blare of radios, inordinate snoring from a farmer who sang his own eulogy as he walked to the lake, 104

sirens like Egyptian handmaidens over the deepest move of waves, Canaan in the splashing of catfish, in the house that has died and is decaying, a shell of a place where people no longer live in flesh. Death holds no fear for folk who are Christians. Grandma sits on the back porch in a metal glider, riding silently back and forth, cobwebs in the corner, her spittoon from a Campbell’s soup can by her foot, through the door comes a sucking energy like a giant, empty heart with open arms. She goes again back into the midst of it with all of them, all the blood of the farm that has gone to the water and all the plethora of death, all the endless ways of leaving in the air over the farm, among the million blades of grass pushing up, in the clearings between the pines, a harsh crackle from CB radios, an ambulance starting up from the lake weighed by a sudden journey to Canaan, through and past the lake. The life slips free over the fields. I will be back in the by and by. Dying ain’t forever. In the house that has died, the dead come down wooden stairs at midnight, soft feet like cotton shuffling to the front porch, sitting down to dangle over the edge, examining the picnic table where children ate watermelon. Granddaddy sits in his corner, napping, sleeping in the nest of a big, empty heart, a sucking energy, a song like Egyptian handmaidens over the lake, the dark, moving silence around this world.

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Luxembourg Garden to Danielle Legros Georges

I am set off from men and women by their tongues, my brown-red skin, their words I hear, but am only learning to speak, by a music I am listening to, for understanding. Nature has caught me here, in trees, sections of grass, neatly laid rows of plants. I have been freed by language to think how much there is in the eye of a pigeon that looks like me, black and plowing through a thousand pat assumptions. I set my croissants down beside me, cover the juice to keep out the leaves. Thousands and thousands, a universe of nerves are placed on my every move— from the leaves in trees, from the blades of grass, from the squirrels holding me at bay. I am coming to an early peace, the one given when everything familiar is taken away. We see the plan of life. The bench is on earth 106

owned once by the Medicis. I watch the police in their crisp blue, guarding the grass. Nothing matters.

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New England At night a voice lends its enchantment, and New England is owned by the pondering dead.

Lovers in the Needles As twilight set fire to bobbing hills of snow, making the tinkling reflections in the crystals explode in tiny, brilliant burstings, she sat alone in the kitchen, by the shaking window rattling in the rough groove. She sat knitting a nightshirt for the child to come, sighing for the tiny graves in the grove of birch and elm, reciting quietly the prayers that set their young bodies in the cold earth and snow. She sat until she saw a young sailor running up the Boston harbor in April, mangoes stuffed in his coat, gulls chasing round the masts of brigs at the dock, and he reached for her lips. She felt flush, then hollow, her lips pasted on glass; she opened her eyes, the snow overcame her again, her hands fell in silence of wood popping and whistling in the hearth, of shadows

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without voice sliding from wall to vicious wall, only his militia certificate and the cold, impossible boots that thrilled and appalled. Her eyes shot out and around, the moon had captured her, full and beckoning, over the flickering snow. She put a leaf in the Gospels and found the rope, marched slow and weightless, singing up the stairs, heavenward. Her benediction came with the squeaking yell of timber burdened with her weight, the swinging dress and collar, her soft, white feet pedaling the air above the stool, her tongue jammed and caught, as she tried to sing “Amen.” In colonial New England women braved the winters and died young. The coffers were filled with Africans, molasses, rum, and oil.

The Minister’s Compass Some Sundays when red maples bloom, I sleep in the Baptist church squatting in Old Providence’s hill, unbeknownst to the tourists, to old men in herringbone. I step among them and search 109

their eyes for the gratitude their fathers hoped for as they slept in forecastles. I look in slavering mouths for the hallelujahs to pump up when they think of who packed the cobblestone, who delivered the mackerel and cod, who drifted down Africa’s coast, collecting the naked slaves, who drummed God in their heads, who gave the Cross to Indians, who took this blessed nation out of heaven’s launch and set her virgin hull into the world’s deep blood. Stopping, I hear nothing but cheap chatter of the moment, and the very next moment, no vision of the future, only the indolent stare, with tidy talk of television. Moving among the living, I think of how freedom is a mandate for everyone, how I have come to own nothing. My heart is confused, a compass on the spin.

Cherubs in the Glen When the madam paced the wharves in Boston, she looked for something special,

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a delightful, naked girl who might have died on board with greater cargo, but stared now with pleading eyes, and she became a Wheatley, a genius like a warbling finch, prodigious, gay, and fragile. She took the breath away from gaping strangers, turning the language and fixing it like someone adorning a forest with Chinese silk pasting the red walls of the Veil with the human constant. When they buried the four fallen from fighting in the Boston Massacre, she rushed to her quill and penned a tribute. Her heart was full of song, and when it quit, she fell dead with a child, long after the brave lights held in the Old North Church. She fell dead with a child, beyond the plea of Diana, a woman in colonial New England. “To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” Her silver gleanings were the songs in the elms above the head of a ship caulker once a slave who turned the word again to kindle the soul’s soft string. 111

The Minister’s Heart From a sermon’s midst, I would catch you in the square, dark hair flaming deep, enchanting, a tune rising from your head like a chorus. Your soft, counted movements under the trees like the slow plucked strings of a harp halted my hand holding the quill until I strode the room, begging grace not to lift its lace hem from my head, begging for the very light to leave my eyes so I could take the world through my hands. That only fed Satan’s laughter, for as I thought of the world, I thought in an instant of a frightened flock of finches, and your hands, the nimble grasp around the neck of a bottle, or the assured laugh you gave to the lies of the fishermen, as your neck arched white in the sun, turning a hundred shades as you walked. I ached and wept like a green sailor, pouring my tears on the pages of the Psalms, banging Proverbs with a clenched fist. I stripped to the waist, beat myself with tight leather

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to loosen the domination of the flesh, but each time I shamefully touched myself, it was you my soul cried for, you my very being denied grace for, you I wanted to wrap in the black leaves of my coat and press through my naked breast. Now I have you, my fingers hold that hair that derives its power from the trills of the moon. At night I pull the cloth back for the stars to shine on your filling breasts, the soft rising of your belly, to set miniature twinkles in the toes I paint with my tongue in the morning. I hold your head and am not shaken by the spectre of Lucifer dancing in the window, the dance of poor Job, for I have nothing but my life, and that I would give for you. In the mornings when you bring the blueberries, I hold your head as long as prudence will allow in the day, before the serpent’s head rises in the pious eyes, before God’s rage goes shouting in the woods, beating wildly from tree to anchored tree,

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and I am held to you by the flame of breast on breast, the sense of immortality I feel when I gaze on the crown of your thighs, a white and auburn bloom that rules me with its perfume, that makes my self-flagellation a mockery of love’s florid dignity. And do not die, never die— for the Puritan councils and our entangled exegesis, I will wear the dread emblem branded on the flesh of my heart until it takes my breath, and I sleep to the Day of Doom.

The Whalers We were off island for two weeks, headed south for the leviathan. I was on deck sleeping, the sun burning pleasant fires in all my pores, when from the crow’s nest, “Blows. There she blows.” They trampled me, running to starboard side, “Get up you old nigger, there’s one of God’s beasts bathing above like a ship overturned and hull up. Get your one good hand

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you lazy nigger, get it now.” The captain bellowed to lower the boats, the whale lounging in the sun, resting from charting the world, its great soul giving thanks in sprays that shot up, seen for miles around, talking in thunderous bass to all the Deep’s populace, issuing kingly demands, while its death sped on in cedar whaleboats with harpoons like razors and whale lines set to follow him to the floor. When they cut him, he sliced through the surface as if he had wings, taking both boats and crew on a Nantucket sleigh ride, breaking one, drowning the crew, taking the other until it could not budge a fluke, and the final point was cast in his eye, a sin as sure as extinguishing stars, for I heard him sing when they did it, when they cut his lungs and the thick blood ran, unsure of a world it had lived in but never seen. On board, rolling the blanket piece, the clouds turned sorrowful faces 115

in their white juxtaposition, the scorns of angels watching a huge saint undone to the bone, its dignity boiling in the tryworks, while I changed the seawater beneath them with my good hand, the bad one maimed by a whale that sounded and took whale lines and my hand with her, the hemp burning me to the bone. This one gave two hundred barrels, and we plunged farther south, farther than the Indians dreamed when they hunted with canoes, boiling the monarchs of the deep on beaches in tryworks there. We headed for the Pacific and the giant flesh that swam there in herds governing the Earth from Antarctica to the Arctic, relentlessly hunted by men afraid of earth oil and disappearing profits. And the old whalers on shore lived comfortably sometimes, after the storms, the ships’ bones bleaching like the whales’ in the sun.

Provincetown Ambling through the cape, we begin at Buzzard’s Bay, 116

stopping in the full moon to play with an itinerant retriever, watching his wet body melt in the trail of moonlight linking the beach to the gods. He loses the wood floating and threatens to drown himself with determination in the black water, until we throw more flotsam, and he yelps to celebrate the deception, the call away from the dead end of duty that swallowed men and made women suck and choke on the delicate lace of loneliness. Driving on, the wail of ocean is hushed by the towering woods until we reach the point, the first landing of Puritans, where Cook assembled his thespians in Mary Vorse’s old wharf, looking out the window, dreaming of some revival, some Greek organic seed to deify the American soul, as O’Neill carved his dark emperor. We watch for contented artists who sign bloodless treaties with despair. At night bright ships sail the sky, pushed on by the songs of ghosts given back by history’s rituals for an eternal voyage back to love.

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My Father’s Geogr aphy I was parading the Côte d’Azur, hopping the short trains from Nice to Cannes, following the maze of streets in Monte Carlo to the hill that overlooks the ville. A woman fed me pâté in the afternoon, calling from her stall to offer me more. At breakfast I talked in French with an old man about what he loved about America—the Kennedys. On the beaches I walked and watched topless women sunbathe and swim, loving both home and being so far from it. At a phone looking to Africa over the Mediterranean, I called my father, and, missing me, he said, “You almost home boy. Go on cross that sea!”

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Theme for Intermediate Chinese after Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B”

Teacher recites and I follow, copying her words taping the class so I can listen at home make sentences she says one for every word and I count them in Chinese, building the tones from memories A child of the fifties, it is the time of my fifties when I rub my hair and touch only the wrinkly skin that has forgotten hair . . . I count days as gifts now homework is a gift and this small flat twelve thousand miles away, on the other side of forgetting and remembering I take the MRT subway to my neighborhood walk past the lady who is not so nice to the faces that warm and brighten when I pass, through the park with children slides swings and old women under the trees across the tiles of the walkway to my building to press my security key to the elevator, kiss it softly to say it’s me again as if the key doesn’t know the only black man in the neighborhood 我 is the word for “I” and it sounds like woe’s sadness, or whoa, the sound to stop the whirring of things I practice it, writing over and over, rolling on the sound of the elevated train going by . . . where everyone knows I is me I meditate on the congregation of genes and wishes that brought me here, counting back the four generations to the first African, naming along the way the Native Americans Europeans the polka-dot army of chromosomes and molecules like tiny spaceships that align themselves with mystic glue so that I am the same mystery each day and do not dissolve into a glob in the midst of Taipei’s rush to go and buy things as I recite alone to myself the Chinese for going and buying

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What have I bought in this place where only the inside can matter and the outside is so many things to so many and who are we?  The Chinese sentence for this takes me all night, into the slide of constellations over night markets and the humid cling of music to silence . . . we are genes we are the art of the mind of some great emptiness above or here below inside the bulb of a beet, things that grow underground and thrive on darkness, the humble fullness of light.

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Notes The title of this collection is inspired by the late Jou Tsung Hua, the mathematician and Taijiquan devotee, who said Shao Kang Chieh of the Sung Dynasty (960–1279) received divination methods for the Yijing that utilized mathematics. The methods were in a book the old man had been guarding, waiting for the prophesied scholar to appear to receive it. This mathematical key was entitled Mei Hua Xin Yi, 梅 花心易, or The Plum Flower Mind. The philosopher Shao Yung (1011–1077), is said to have developed the fortune-telling philosophy known as plum blossom (flower), and the poet Lin Bu (967–1028), is famous for poems on this theme. The plum flower is the national flower of Taiwan.   On the dedication page of this book, the characters following Shifu Huang Chien Liang’s name are tien shan pai, which is a system of Chinese boxing that originated in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province. Shifu Huang is the sixty-fourth generation grandmaster of the system. Shifu Huang inherited the title from the late Wang Cheuh Jen, who helped popularize the system in eastern China in the early twentieth century. Wang Cheuh Jen made Shifu Huang his only disciple.   The book’s epigraph by The Dhammapada was translated by Dr. Thomas Byron.   The book’s part titles, gold (metal), water, wood, fire, and earth, are the five elements of Chinese philosophy. In Daoist cultivation that sequence is the creative path.   The poems designated I, LIV, XXIX, and LXIII are from the author’s collection entitled The Ten Lights of God, which was inspired by the Kabbalah and the Dao De Jing. The book is organized as a sequential reading for meditation and thus has a mathematical structure that takes the reader along the Kabbalah’s schematic rendering of God’s body, which begins at the Shekhinah.   C.W. is Mrs. Catrina White, with whom the author spent the summer of 1985 in Indian Pond, New Hampshire.   “Rambling” is written in the form of the “Bop,” a poetic form created by the author during his tenure as a faculty member at Cave

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Canem. Influences on the form include the blues poem as created by Langston Hughes.   “Adam and Eve,” “The Model,” “Lovers with Flowers,” “SelfPortrait,” and “Solitude” were written to paintings by Marc Chagall by the same titles, as were all the poems in the author’s collection entitled Stations in a Dream.   He Nan Temple is a Buddhist temple and monastery in Hualien, Taiwan, where the author occasionally spends time. Dr. Yu Hsi, the director and teacher at He Nan, is also a poet and writer who creates Buddhist-inspired writings and opens the temple to certain poets, writers, and composers as a private retreat.

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Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude to family and friends who continuously support my work and to the group of friends who helped me make preliminary choices about poems to include in this special collection of my poetry. I would like to especially thank to Dr. Yu Hsi of He Nan Buddhist Temple and Monastery in Taiwan for giving me sanctuary and Florella Orowan of FLAR for helping me to make the final preparations of the manuscript of this collection.   My gratitude also to Dr. Perng Ching Hsi, who gave me my Chinese name in 2002, to Mr. Bei Ta, who made an addition to that name three years later, and to Professor Tess Onwueme, who gave me my Ibo name in 1997, while I was poet-in-residence at the Stadler Poetry Center at Bucknell University. Some of the poems in this collection were previously published, sometimes in slightly different forms, in the following sources: Journals: 5 A.M.; African-American Review; American Poetry Review; Callaloo; canwehaveourballback.com; Pequod; Plum: A Journal. Anthologies: Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems; Jazz Poems; Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology; Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951 to 1977. Collections: Water Song (Callaloo Press/University of Virginia, 1985); My Father’s Geography (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Stations in a Dream (Dolphin Moon Press, 1993); Timber and Prayer (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Talisman (Tia Chucha Press/Northwestern University, 1998); Sandy Point (The Press of Appletree Alley, 2000); Multitudes (Sarabande Books, 2000); The Ten Lights of God (Bucknell University Press, 2001).

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