As one could possibly imagine.
Yet, there, in a cage … in the most dire
Primordial circumstances, the Venus
Has a dignity and a humanness that is totally lacking
In her spectators and puts them to shame.
I shed a tear. Mary does too—at her vulnerability.
As females we all are burdened
In the face of a male society.
I am revolted. I try as did several other ladies
To make eye contact with the Venus
To communicate the sympathy I truly feel
But there is no communication
Except insults and threats,
Neither between the public and the Hottentot
Nor between the Hottentot and the white females
To be sure she is ugly,
She has an enormous, astounding posterior
But her face is actually pleasant
And she is very young
She is now a household word in England
And a celebrity in London Society and the popular press,
Who use her as a plaything and political tool against Grenville
Not a day goes by that there is not
Another wicked, obscene cartoon
Or caricature in the daily press.
The politics of her, the obscenity of her
Her servitude is a blot on English Society.
But even the worse of scandals
Become romantic
And even respectable in two thousand years;
Witness Cleopatra …
The most virtuous read of Cleopatra with sympathy
Even in boarding schools and were she, by some miracle
Erased out of the book of history,
The loss would be enormous.
The same applies to Helen, Phryne and other bad lots.
In fact, now that one thinks of it,
Most of the attractive personages in history
Male or female, especially the latter, were bad lots.
And the true Venus?
Haven’t the most scandalous acts
In history been done in her name?
In the name of passionate, unbridled, and uncontrollable fornication?
Shouldn’t we love anything called Venus?
I ask gazing at this strange, humiliated creature …
If you are a woman?
There is nothing that makes our sex more aware
Of our own oppression
Than witnessing the horrendous, blatant
Torture of the brown races?
A brown member of our own sex?
I shudder to think I actually paid to see this!
This ink bleeds onto
The middle finger of my right hand
And no, I am not going
To denounce her suffering
Or write about her
Or recognize her
Wasn’t this why I love freaks?
I bless my stars that I have done with Tuesday.
But alas! Wednesday arrives.
—Jane Austen to her ghostwriter, Lady Eliza de Feuillide
Why Did We Leave Zanzibar?
Dark hallooed sister,
Penumbrae jewel
Burning in dry tobacco leaf beauty,
Brittle and flaking discontent,
Eyes damned with the silt of disappointment,
Lodged and sheltered in Public Housing,
Celled there tapping in Morse code on the bars of the mind:
The unspeakable that resounds through
The landscape of your nerve ends like orgasm.
Long-fingered, long-necked
Delicate wrist-ed and ankled sister,
Wide-hipped and smelling of honey,
Eyes echoing hollow words and unremembered places,
Fingers stuttering, tearing
And wrapping themselves around
The essential question:
Why did we leave Zanzibar?
Something in the line of the back spells
The irredeemable exhaustion of trying to make ends meet;
Those two butt ends of our amputated history,
Cauterized on the hot iron of self-hate,
Lusting after self-destruction
That we find in split vaginas,
Smeared with the muck of barbarians,
Birthing a race of orphans and madmen
When we could have stayed on the beach,
Heads severed and wombs filled with sand,
Clutching our ancestors,
Rejoicing in sterility,
Reveling in abortion,
Resplendent with infanticide,
Cursing the living with the last breath of strangled children.
You say we had no choice:
There is always one alternative
To rape and every woman knows
it
Dark-breathed sister,
Sinister survival worshiper,
Ready with the sword to smite the suicides,
Jailer for our prison-makers,
Grinding down our men with religion-pocked
Grins of satisfaction (Jesus Saves),
Crushing our defenseless sons with the jawbone of that Jew’s cross,
Dazed and concussed, they stumble into the street to play stickball
Driving their fathers mad with grief and shame
So that their rage is spent in our bodies
(Or better still, the wives and daughters of the enemy);
And how we both glory in it,
Smack our lips in rutting satisfaction,
Tasting curdled blood and milk
Left standing in the sun too long
By absent-minded missionaries:
Benedictus qui venit in
Nomine Domini.
Sassy, sweet-voiced sister,
Moon-browed and night-mouthed
In deepest song,
Lying on your back in cathedrals,
Content that another night has passed
Without murder,
Lying on your back in cathedrals,
Masturbating with the true cross (Sweet Jesus)
While black men thrash around with white flesh,
Listening for your hysterical screams resounding in the tabernacle,
Staining stained glass: those Technicolor prisms of Middle-Eastern legend.
And over all, Cleopatra’s asp hovers:
Sliding between legs,
That perpetually open route to power,
Posing the essential question on split tongue:
Why did we leave Zanzibar?
Sweet fragrant mango-stenched beach,
Breasts pressed flat against steamed sand,
Seeping through sieve-like flesh,
Carrying carats of ancestor dust,
Rattling like pearls in oyster shells.
Sleek, earth-dyed sister,
Madness glistening at your throat,
We could have stayed on the beach,
Clinging to the rocks like bats,
REFUSING TO MOVE OUR WOMBS,
Scraping them with flint,
Soaking the continent with the holy blood of martyrs.
Plum-lipped sister,
Sad and wild-eyed with my reflection,
I touch one apricot breast
As you touch one brassy one,
And we gaze into each other’s eyes
Like the criminals that we are,
Dark brown gall rising to the surface like oil on water,
Casting up that bottle-wrapped question
Flung into the sea by some desperate hand so many murders ago:
Why did we leave Zanzibar?
On Hearing of a Death in Prison
For George Jackson Blois, August 21, 1971
I heard
A wailing, mournful, sacred
Song,
A bitter, screaming, humping
Song,
A positively displeased Nigger’s<
br />
Song,
A Maximum Security
Song,
A river of bile,
Har-
Monica fresh filled with
Salty blood.
I taste it
Myself
Now.
I heard
A silent Georgia
Badlands
Song,
Flat-out
In the damned black
Of the American sky,
White speckled with
Filthy stars,
Spangled,
Cold as ice,
Cold as Hell.
Frozen over
Out there,
One
Dies.
I heard
A teeth-grinding, heart-stripping lover’s
Song,
A fine jazz ricochet of desire,
Drizzling gall,
Sex-starved and slave-chained in
Songs of sixpence,
The inherited penalty of pain
Passed from father to son in
Songs
Of penitentiaries:
San Rafael,
Folsom,
San Quentin,
Alcatraz,
Soledad.
I heard
A never-ending song of
Solitude,
Eleven years of putrid cement,
Nailed down
With bullets
And the
Constitution
For sixty-seven dollars net,
A song eleven years to sing of
Solitary confinement,
Excrement thrown,
The total death of pride,
The soul-destroying body search,
A rape of every aperture,
A curse so foul
Men cry.
I heard
Black notes on lined paper,
Barred,
Dropping wounded days
Of manhood lost
In gut-punctured, spine-shattered
Death,
Death of the spirit,
Death of the bowels,
Death in the white heat
Of a charred sunlit court,
So lonely it seizes
The heart,
That hoarded, dreamed of
Moment of Life,
The last.
I heard
A clamorous, clapper-tongued
Sound,
The holocaust of Easter Week,
A trenchant trill,
Quivering in heat over
The Entire Race,
Blue desert women,
Wind and sand whipped pillars
Stretching across Africa,
Tattooed hands held over
That obscene opening,
Kohl-ed eyes weeping
Colored tears for Colored Men,
Red veils aspired in Rage
In Rage, In Rage, In Rage.
I heard
A Song
So rich in gut and sweat
That any sperm would flower there,
And any Song
Rejoice in being
Not
For singing.
X.
KEO SIRISOMPHONE
Australian John Everingham gained fame
when he sought asylum for his Laotian wife Keo
Sirisomphone by swimming her on his back out of
Laos under the mile wide Mekong River, a war
zone under American bombing and Cambodian
shelling near Vientiane during the Cambodian
war in May, 1978.
Keo Sirisomphone
Swimming,
Familiar with death’s edge,
Swimming towards you, the waters giving up
Your frail face wracked by the
Changing tides History & War,
Swimming.
Your face all I want of this planet,
Liquid thunder in my ears, as delirium surfaces,
And I think I hear your helpless cries,
But it is only the wind and bursting
Shells of panic.
Swimming,
The long rowing towards you,
Arms silt-caked doing battle,
Against men’s crimes, with only a man’s body
Swimming,
A wisp of pain sucks in gut then flounders
On the sharp stake of my will,
Stronger than snapping turtles
Whose saw-teeth, unlike ours,
Never kill for love.
I feel the scaly rake of dead fish
From the weeping wounds of a furious river
Who does not know who I am or why I am
Swimming.
Sipping in death neatly, cooled by fathoms,
Blinded by barricaded water
That sees so clearly
The only solution to our problem is:
Swimming.
Mouth filling with silver’d eels,
The predators slipping by my temple,
I bear the waters.
Astonished goddesses glance from the deep, And I strike out for them
For they know Zeus’ days of thunder are at present
Coded missiles and heat-detecting rockets.
Ribbons of fright stream behind me,
Shells of longing chalice upwards,
With dying eyes, I see you on the farthest shore,
A thin red dress flung round your body,
Flapping like a battalion flag.
Weariness blurs the spot and changes my course
Yet nothing will change our course,
This swimmer’s race laid out for me
By astrologers long before
I swam.
Ghosts of drowned men pull at my chest
But not without awe,
For I am no longer
Swimming,
But loving.
I drag myself on shore:
A slip of red silk bursts in flight under fire,
Sand splicing, arms flung open and now
We are two.
Wholesale terror in my arms as your heartbeat
Merges with mine and the guns spit
Steady behind me and I dash back into the deep,
One hard breath of yearning.
Then all my loving is conjured for
Swimming.
I have swallowed your heart, diving past exploding shells,
As I make for the other shore
Of the horizon less Mekong.
Your feint weight drags me down
And allows the sky to roll over me.
River grass rakes at your hair
And hot metal strikes all around us,
Like God’s sperm.
I hear a voice like a bright hallucination
Choking, as I try to claim my prize,
Cursing all men
As death-waves rock and
Deep shutters rotate us.
My grip loosens and you plunge downwards
Towards terrible whirlpools.
I dive to retrieve you,
A nail-hold on sanity as
River snails stare blankly,
Watching my half-murdered burden sink,
And I am no longer loving, but
Swimming.
Bloody shoulders sweep
Onto the seventh circle
Breaking destiny
Which drinks in tumors of another man’s war,
Propelling me onto that plateau beyond pain
Swimming.
I let the nightmare carry us where it will,
Insidious as the pollen of our era,
Churning like the century’s politics,
The honky-tonk waters suddenly still, so still
I never see
Arms and hands relieving my burden,
Pulling you from your comatose chaos,
From darkness to living.
And still I could not believe
When the weight faded and floated beyond me.
I called your name
As I was pulled from the ringing wrack,
Your small hands and child’s arms cradling me,
Singing, that we were no longer
Swimming,
But loving.
Camellias
We entered a cathedral
One stormy day,
Rain still glistening
On hyacinths shivering orange.
Rousing in wrath,
The reluctant Gatekeeper
Eyeing us like Lucifer deciding
While we danced
Iridescent from the rain
And laughing, having spent
Half an hour wailing
To be let in,
Stranded on this island
Like Crusoe and his Man,
Pagans come to incorporate
New and lovely Gods.
All set with the rituals
Of our tribe,
Revised to new and modern music,
Ignorant of rules
For the Primitives,
Stories invented by that snob Peter,
The eternal doorman
Of the washed and scented Christ,
Snubbing the Saint Esprit of
Filth and red,
Forgetting that holy men
Would never dare to pass
These waxed and varnished doors into
This cheap bazaar of glass beads
And fetishes, plastic hearts
And Color-Glo postcards.
Yet we pass,
Leaving summer rain
And Eden’s grandiose landscape into
A musical mountain that
Floats like a stone ship on
Rusty water, breathless,
Sprawling on top of sin,
Spilling it like a sloppy drinker;
Warm Sambucca that
Cuts ragged and parched lips,
Releasing in one collective heave
The steaming Christian cant
Nodded to and cheered on by
The Eternal Prompter,
Half voyeur, half pornographer,
Who has all the forgotten clues
From when this cathedral
Was the scared rock of the Mother
And not the Son.
We entered, yearning through rows
Of empty pews, yawning
Like Nubian slaves being baptized
Dark, sullen and insurrectionary,
Subversively black,
They crouch over,
The white-bleached
Skeleton of Saint Julio,
Rattling below in his glass coffin,
Smothered in decaying blossoms,
Epibole on rank and startled bones,
Afire with flickering wax,
Worshipping but not warming
As if any fire
Could quench Sainthood
Except love and so
Love entered,
Splattering boiling blood on chilled sacraments,
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 18