while they could
they held him down and
chopped him, held him up
my little fish, my blueness
swallowed in the air
turned pink
and wailed.
no more. enough.
i lay back, speechless, looking
for something.
to say to myself.
after you have
touched the brain,
that squirmy
lust of maggots,
after you have
pumped the heart,
that thief,
that comic, you
throw her in the trash.
and the little one
in a case
of glass . . .
he is not i
i am not him
he is not i
. . . the stranger.
blue
air
protects us from each other.
here.
here is the note he brings.
it says, mother.
but i do not even know
this man.
in knowledge of young boys
i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming,
a horrible brain in water.
i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle,
when you had no sustenance of metal
when you had no boat to travel
when you stayed in the same
place, treading the question;
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat. we swam
in the last trickle of champagne
before we knew breastmilk—we
shared the night of the closet,
the parasitic
closing on our thumbprint,
we were smudged in a yellow book.
son, we were oak without
mouth, uncut, we were
brave before memory.
Captivity
• • •
But even when I am at a loss to define
the essence of freedom
I know full well the meaning
of captivity.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
(Translated by Antony Graham)
The Minks
In the backyard of our house on Norwood,
there were five hundred steel cages lined up,
each with a wooden box
roofed with tar paper;
inside, two stories, with straw
for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace
back and forth wildly, looking for a way out;
or else they’d hide in their wooden houses, even when
we’d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if
they knew they were beautiful
and wanted to deprive us.
In spring the placid kits
drank with glazed eyes.
Sometimes the mothers would go mad
and snap their necks.
My uncle would lift the roof like a god
who might lift our roof, look down on us
and take us out to safety.
Sometimes one would escape.
He would go down on his hands and knees,
aiming a flashlight like
a bullet of light, hoping to catch
the orange gold of its eyes.
He wore huge boots, gloves
so thick their little teeth couldn’t bite through.
“They’re wild,” he’d say. “Never trust them.”
Each afternoon when I put the scoop of raw meat rich
with eggs and vitamins on their trays,
I’d call to each a greeting.
Their small thin faces would follow as if slightly curious.
In fall they went out in a van, returning
sorted, matched, their skins hanging down on huge metal
hangers, pinned by their mouths.
My uncle would take them out when company came
and drape them over his arm—the sweetest cargo.
He’d blow down the pelts softly
and the hairs would part for his breath
and show the shining underlife which, like
the shining of the soul, gives us each
character and beauty.
Blackbottom
When relatives came from out of town,
we would drive down to Blackbottom,
drive slowly down the congested main streets
—Beubian and Hastings—
trapped in the mesh of Saturday night.
Freshly escaped, black middle class,
we snickered, and were proud;
the louder the streets, the prouder.
We laughed at the bright clothes of a prostitute,
a man sitting on a curb with a bottle in his hand.
We smelled barbecue cooking in dented washtubs,
and our mouths watered.
As much as we wanted it we couldn’t take the chance.
Rhythm and blues came from the windows, the throaty voice of
a woman lost in the bass, in the drums, in the dirty down
and out, the grind.
“I love to see a funeral, then I know it ain’t mine.”
We rolled our windows down so that the waves rolled over us
like blood.
We hoped to pass invisibly, knowing on Monday we would
return safely to our jobs, the post office and classroom.
We wanted our sufferings to be offered up as tender meat,
and our triumphs to be belted out in raucous song.
We had lost our voice in the suburbs, in Conant Gardens,
where each brick house delineated a fence of silence;
we had lost the right to sing in the street and damn creation.
We returned to wash our hands of them,
to smell them
whose very existence
tore us down to the human.
Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
My mother was not impressed with her beauty;
once a year she put it on like a costume,
plaited her black hair, slick as cornsilk, down past her hips,
in one rope-thick braid, turned it, carefully, hand over hand,
and fixed it at the nape of her neck, stiff and elegant as a crown,
with tortoise pins, like huge insects,
some belonging to her dead mother,
some to my living grandmother.
Sitting on the stool at the mirror,
she applied a peachy foundation that seemed to hold her down,
to trap her,
as if we never would have noticed what flew among us unless
it was weighted and bound in its mask.
Vaseline shined her eyebrows,
mascara blackened her lashes until they swept down like feathers,
darkening our thoughts of her.
Her eyes deepened until they shone from far away.
Now I remember her hands, her poor hands, which even then
were old from scrubbing,
whiter on the inside than they should have been,
and hard, the first joints of her fingers, little fattened pads,
the nails filed to sharp points like old-fashioned ink pens,
painted a jolly color.
Her hands stood next to her face and wanted to be put away,
prayed
for the scrub bucket and brush to make them useful.
And, as I writ
e, I forget the years I watched her
pluck hairs like a witch from her chin, magnify
every blotch—as if acid were thrown from the inside.
But once a year my mother
rose in her white silk slip,
not the slave of the house, the woman,
took the ironed dress from the hanger—
allowing me to stand on the bed, so that
my face looked directly into her face,
and hold the garment away from her
as she pulled it down.
St. Peter Claver
Every town with black Catholics has a St. Peter Claver’s.
My first was nursery school.
Miss Maturin made us fold our towels in a regulation square
and nap on army cots.
No mother questioned; no child sassed.
In blue pleated skirts, pants, and white shirts,
we stood in line to use the open toilets
and conserved light by walking in darkness.
Unsmiling, mostly light-skinned, we were the children of the
middle class, preparing to take our parents’ places in a
world that would demand we fold our hands and wait.
They said it was good for us, the bowl of soup, its
pasty whiteness;
I learned to swallow and distrust my senses.
On holy cards St. Peter’s face is olive-toned, his hair
near kinky;
I thought he was one of us who pass between the rich and poor,
the light and dark.
Now I read he was “a Spanish Jesuit priest who labored for
the salvation of the African Negroes and the abolition
of the slave trade.”
I was tricked again, robbed of my patron,
and left with a debt to another white man.
The Weakness
That time my grandmother dragged me
through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up
by my arm, hissing, “Stand up,”
through clenched teeth, her eyes
bright as a dog’s
cornered in the light.
She said it over and over,
as if she were Jesus,
and I were dead. She had been
solid as a tree,
a fur around her neck, a
light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked
on swirling
marble and passed through
brass openings—in 1945.
There was not even a black
elevator operator at Saks.
The saleswoman had brought velvet
leggings to lace me in, and cooed,
as if in the service of all grandmothers.
My grandmother had smiled, but not
hungrily, not like my mother
who hated them, but wanted to please,
and they had smiled back, as if
they were wearing wooden collars.
When my legs gave out, my grandmother
dragged me up and held me like God
holds saints by the
roots of the hair. I begged her
to believe I couldn’t help it. Stumbling,
her face white
with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing
away from those eyes
that saw through
her clothes, under
her skin, all the way down
to the transparent
genes confessing.
Fires in Childhood
I. Aerial Photographs Before the Atomic Bomb
Why did such terrible events
catch my eye? After Hiroshima,
I turned the picture in Life around
in circles, trying to figure out this huge
wheel in the middle of the air, how it
turned, a Ferris wheel, its lights
burning like eyes.
The atom spinning
on course over the sleeping,
vulnerable planet. I turned it the way one might
turn a kaleidoscope or prism. Even then I
knew about the town lying under,
like a child sleeping under the
watchful gaze of a rapist, before the spasm
of stopped breath, the closure at the
scream of the throat, before the body is awakened
along its shocked spine to bursting
light, the legs closing, the arms,
like a chilled flower. That eye, that spinning eye
seeking the combustible.
This was a heat
I had felt already in our house on Norwood.
Everything
looked green, placid as a green field,
predictable as machinery—an antique clock.
This was the instant
before destruction,
the fiery atom stuck
as if under the control of the artist
before it spilled and became irretrievable.
Could it be sucked back
in its lead bag, the doors of the underbelly slammed,
and those men who went on to
suicide and madness, go on instead
to become lovers, priests, Buddhist
smilers and scholars, gardeners in the small plots
of contained passion?
II. The Chicago Streetcar Fire
. . . burning out of the
center of the Free Press, its peeling paint
crackling like paper.
I hid the pictures from my mother, needing to see
those who were fried in an
iron skillet, the men, women, children
melted together in a crust of skin,
a blackened hand more dense
than charred steak, as if it had been
forgotten in the fire years. They crammed together
at the exit as if terror could
leap through locked doors.
Only a fraction of an inch
from safety! Maybe if one had
gone the other way—
blood going up in flames
like gasoline, heads torches.
Children who did not
escape their childhoods—
Feathers! Ash!
High School
I didn’t want to be
bunched with the black girls in the back
of Girls Catholic Central’s cafeteria.
They were my kin,
but sitting there I was aware
of that invisible wall, the others
circling us like stars. The others:
Gintare,
the Ukrainian with limbs like silk and childbearing hips.
Kathleen, who would be a nun, whose mother saw the Virgin in
the suburbs.
Pignalls, whose body had grown into a giant’s, who towered
over the gold prom queens, not like a man, but a child who
had grown into a monster, her broken speech a path out of
herself she could not follow.
Donna, her hair hanging over her face like a veil—her knees
made for kneeling, her stomach for fasts, her genitals for
the loneliness of the cot, but the rest of her unable to hold
up holiness.
Jo, who let boys penetrate and shrugged off other wisdoms;
her long eyelashes held grains of sand, as if tiny pieces of
eternity were working themselves through her.
Lenore, whose square body threatened the narrow pews;
expelled, who lived in the back of a White Tower with her
first woman lover.
Marty, whose palate and teeth stuck out, like some hairy
specimen of our ancestors, alone with her mother, sleeping
on the pull-out cot.
None of them called me nigger;
but they were ignorant
as God of our suffering.
H
amtramck: The Polish Women
What happens to the beautiful girls with slender hips and
bright round dresses?
One day they disappear without leaving a trace of themselves,
and the next they appear again, dragging a heavy
shopping cart from the bakery to the pork store with
packages of greasy sausage and potatoes.
Like old nuns they waddle down the main street, past the rich
gaudy cathedral with the little infant of Prague—in
real clothes—linens they tend lovingly, starch in
steamy buckets (their hands thick as potatoes, white),
and iron with dignity.
The Struggle
We didn’t want to be white—or did we?
What did we want?
In two bedrooms, side by side,
four adults, two children.
My aunt and uncle left before light.
My father went to the factory, then the cleaners.
My mother vacuumed, ironed, cooked,
pasted war coupons. In the afternoon
she typed stencils at the metal kitchen table.
I crawled under pulling on her skirt.
What did we want?
As the furniture became modern, the carpet deep, the white
ballerina on the mantel lifted her arms like some girl near
terror;
the Degas ballerinas folded softly in a group, a gray sensual
beauty.
What did we push ourselves out of ourselves
to do? Our hands
on the doors, cooking utensils, keys; our hands
folding the paper money, tearing the paid bills.
Before Making Love
I move my hands over your face,
closing my eyes, as if blind;
the cheek bones, broadly spaced,
the wide thick nostrils of the African,
the forehead whose bones push
at both sides as if the horns
of new-fallen angels lie just under,
the chin that juts forward with pride.
I think of the delicate skull of the Taung child—
earliest of human beings
emerged from darkness—whose geometry
brings word of a small town of dignity
that all the bloody kingdoms rest on.
[The Taung child is a fossil, a juvenile
Australopithecus africanus, from Taung,
South Africa, two million years old.]
On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings
The restaurant is empty
except for the cooks and waiters.
One makes a pillow of linens
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