three great-grands ago,
cracked a whip.
Virginia, my ghosts
need gathering.
Come to the table
and sit, goddammit. Sit.
BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE
A Golden Shovel
after Gwendolyn Brooks,
“The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.”
A man asks those viewing Open Casket what comes after
their shock, when from the
safe distance of cocktails the boy’s murder
becomes a matter of palette, of line and stroke, after
someone fumbles their way through the
—drowned? Was he drowned? Wasn’t the Chicago burial
a kind of show, they say, curated by Emmett’s
mother? The painter says, And I, too, am a mother.
Our tools seduce. Ask what the shovel is
burying. Know that the paintbrush sees only a
canvas: Make it yours. Make it pretty.
Carolyn Bryant is here and shit-faced
again and muttering that she couldn’t do a damn thing
to stop them, bacon burned, wheels off the
wagon, that if her husband had heard even a tint
of recanting he’d have slapped her silly. Of
course she’s here—moth pulled
to the flame, one kid jealous of another’s taffy.
Now that a white woman’s hands are all over this, she
wants in. Carolyn paces, paces, sits.
Ask the poet what gets colored in.
Ask the poet what gets colored in a
red
room.
Ask the poet who sits in a red room, drinking.
Most oil painters will not use pure black.
They build their black instead, from shades of coffee
and navy. When she
leans toward the painting she almost kisses
the tacky surface. There. She adjusts the spot-lamp, her
skin catching the glow off what has been killed.
Emmett Till is a fourteen-year-old boy,
quick to laugh and
to help his mother with the laundry, and she
offers driving lessons if they go to Omaha. But he is
determined to be Mississippi-bound. Does he say sorry?
Does he promise, next time? Before the chaos,
he tucks a pack of bubblegum in
his pocket. She brings him home to the windy
city so thousands can file by in their best church grays.
At the Biennial, the man’s T-shirt challenges those passing through.
BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE. They murmur over the bloom of a
wound, seeing red without seeing red.
Question the shovel, he says, that’d till this prairie.
WEAK OCEAN
The quake was born in Mineral, Virginia, and traveled north with a magnitude of 5.8. Cracks appeared in the Washington Monument. The cathedral lost two pinnacles. To explain the damage, seismologists will announce that we sit on only the thinnest layer of silts—“weak ocean sediments”—and beneath that, crystalline rock whose shaking energy creates an echo chamber of the soft mud. I drive to her house, ninety miles north of Mineral, and park where she used to grow snapdragons. I wait on the porch where geraniums stood sentry, nodding their incomplete heads. We walk the house together, straightening paintings. My job is to move dishtowels from the stove’s burners and check for mold in the fridge. She worries about getting things in order for “the girls.” No one knows who “the girls” are. What about the china? Her crystal flutes? The dining room is dusty, samovar hunkering in a corner. We peer through the cabinet’s leaded panes at teacups and gilded saucers, champagne coupes. Only when I open the door do they give in to gravity—stacks of porcelain that sag and swing, fractures vertebral, glass popping. She laughs, a kindness or symptom. Someone always lets the earthquake out.
THE SNIPER DANCE
We needed bacon and bread, so we went to Magruder’s. We needed gas, so we stopped at Exxon. Kids got on the school bus. We watched for a white Chevy Astro. Dear Policeman, the tarot card said, I am God. The woman shot in the parking lot at Seven Corners was an FBI analyst, the newspapers would tell us later. She’d studied mathematics. She’d once been held at machete point in Guatemala City. She coached skiing in Stuttgart and tennis in Okinawa. While teaching in Belgium, her house burned. She raised two children. Her chest was marked by a double mastectomy, still healing. She phoned her father and promised, We’re just going out to Home Depot and that’s it. Later, her husband remembered wet flicking the side of his face. The snipers took Interstate 66 and got locked in traffic, a gaze away from an off-duty officer. But they drove a Chevrolet Caprice, a dark blue sedan, and we were all looking for an Astro. Witnesses gave partial plates for a light-colored van. Our dance was discernible only in transition: casual gait; casual gait; casual gait; then the head ducked, swerve to the left, a bag hitched—to throw off his aim, wherever the sniper might be waiting.
KISS ME
Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits in the nineteenth row of my heart while onstage, a woman has been conscribed to the shape of a shrew. The actress has forty-carat eyes, an aquiline nose; her shoulders slight, her waist small enough. She is spanked over our hero’s knee. Everyone is laughing except the conductor, who must steady his baton, and the house manager, who has seen it before, and the actors directed instead to be aghast, agape, gawking, agog, whatever Cole Porter rhymes with dismayed, and Ginsburg, who adjusts the pearl clipped to her ear. She curls the program in her lap. This is tiring, attending theaters of the heart. She doesn’t relish it as Sandra Day O’Connor did, sipping prosecco at the intermission of Porgy & Bess. The gangsters soft-shoe, reminding us to brush up on our Shakespeare. The actress sings “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.” Soon, Kate will be tamed. That’s how we know the ending is happy.
JEFFERSON, MIDNIGHT
In another version of this story, he is a naturalist who dabbled in politics. He reinvented the plow. He joined the American Philosophical Society’s Bone Committee and, while trying to prove the great Western lion, gave us our first giant sloth. He shipped a rotting moose to France to demonstrate the greatness of our mammals. He is a father of paleontology who didn’t believe extinction was part of God’s plan. He asked Lewis and Clark, should they encounter the mammoth, to capture one. For months his sea wall has been sinking, the Potomac’s mud flats sucking at support timbers. In 1918 and for six summers after, the Tidal Basin was chlorinated so this bank could become a beach. Whites only. Spiders who are drawn to rising heat populate the ceiling of Jefferson’s memorial. Once the sun sets, the temperature drops; they lose their grip and fall. Bodies bounce off my shoulders, bodies land in my hair. Guards call this the spider rain.
LINCOLN, MIDNIGHT
Never have I seen such majestic shins. He is pensive, frock coat unbuttoned, larger than once planned, and if he were to stand his head would nearly scrape the ceiling. What if that is Robert E. Lee’s face, sculpted into the waves of hair? No telling of the Union without the telling of the Confederacy. No stranger a feat than infusing Alabama marble with paraffin to better let the sky’s light in. The sculptor took these hands from a May 1860 cast, before he had signed any proclamations or called 75,000 volunteers to an army. In May 1860, he was only a Republican nominee. Leonard Volk came to Illinois, and as he prepared the plaster he asked Abraham Lincoln for two gestures: one hand a fist, and in the other, something to be held loosely. In the statue this postures openness, conciliation. In reality, Lincoln was holding a broom handle he’d fetched from his tool shed.
CHERRY TREE REBELLION
To save the cherry trees—O Cissy O Eliza O Clara O Catherine—you buckled your shoes and descended. Fifty of you marched your petition to the President’s house; a flimflam, he called it, cooked up by the newspapers. The next day, a hundred and fifty of you marched to the Tidal Basin. You grabbed the sho
vels from the Civilian Conservation Corps, refilling holes. You hitched your skirts and chained yourselves to the trunks. The Secretary of the Interior sent lunch over, and coffee, cup after cup, coaxing your bladders toward betrayal. O Cissy O Eliza O Clara O Catherine, O Valkyries in muslin, I imagine you staying deep into the night of November 1938. For the first two hours, you talk. In the third hour, you sing. In the fifth hour, your stoles come alive: fresh dew on the eyes of each fox, fur damp, an exhalation that fogs as if breath. But you’d already gone home to your warm beds. Roosevelt ordered the graveyard crew to dig fast, and the men did.
ROOSEVELT, MIDNIGHT
The Depression is a crash of water; terraced flow narrates the TVA dam. Carnelian granite erupts to blocks, naked in their etched enjambments: I hate / war. A man leans in to his radio. The breadline waits in bronze. Eleanor stands in her resolute suit to address the United Nations. Everywhere, his words. Missing: her words. Missing: Lucy Mercer. Missing: FDR’s cigarette, clenched at a rakish angle. For his version of the story, head to 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, and look for a block the size of a desk, with In Memory of and the years of his birth and death. That’s his version. This version is an amusement park. The memorial opened and, four years later, they added a wheelchair. The stone is beautiful when snow falls. The stone is beautiful when the cherry blossoms accumulate, windswept. This sculpted wall is supposed to speak of WPA, CCC, the alphabet agencies. But its Braille dots are oversized beyond any one fingertip. This is gibberish, a visitor says, feeling the spaces between.
EINSTEIN, MIDNIGHT
The memorial’s shape is cumulative, clay on clay. His brow wrinkles, his sweater sags, toes flex gently in open sandals. What you see is his 1953 face combined with an imagined body. Mass is the presence of energy, an object’s resistance to anything other than what it is already doing. Yes, you may sit on Albert’s lap. Look past your feet; those 2,700 studs map what we knew of a particular day’s sky. Did you know he patented a refrigerator with no moving parts? His fridge collaborator was the one who asked him to cosign the letter that said, It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium. Later, he’d say that if he’d known Germans would fail, he’d have never urged Americans to succeed. When he applied for clearance on the Manhattan Project, our Army refused. Now, an artist works into the dawn hours, looping with her crochet needle until his figure is shrouded in pink, purple, and teal. Yarn-bombing, we call this. Anything, in the right hands, can be made to explode.
TITANIC, MIDNIGHT
A dollar toward the cause came from Col. John Jacob Astor’s own pocketbook, paid to Mrs. Archibald Forbes. They had settled up after a bridge game on the night of April 14, 1912. His body would eventually be inventoried, as they all were. No. 124, male, about age fifty, light hair and moustache. He wore a blue serge suit and a flannel shirt, “J.J.A.” on the collar. He wore brown boots, a belt with gold buckle, diamonds in his cuff links and ring. That’s not Astor seen here though, arms thrown wide. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney is said to have based the face on her brother, who went down with the Lusitania. The figure designed by Whitney is only vaguely sexed, not clothed so much as draped. Erected by the Women of America, says the inscription, meaning twenty-five thousand women who mailed in their dollar bills. This is the second installation. Officials disappeared the memorial for thirty years before it reappeared down by Fort McNair, saying, We need to make way for the Kennedy Center. The construction was a convenient excuse. There had been miscalculations and, in 1936, an unusual snowmelt. No one could quite shake the memory of the Great Potomac Flood: how waters had lapped the feet, then the knees, waist, the lithe pectorals, before finally crowning his brow.
AMERICAN ROME
Marion “Shepilov” Barry Jr. (1936–2014)
Marionberry: jams of Washington
state. I thought they were mocking this city.
Take a mayor and boil his sugar down—
spoon-spreadable, sweet. We take presidents
and run them in a game’s fourth-inning stretch.
We take Bullets and turn them to Sea Dogs.
Remember that vote, that ballot? Sea Dogs
Dragons Stallions Express. The Washington
Wizards was no more or less of a stretch.
We wave gavels like wands in this city.
We’re the small town in which a president
can plant some roses. Each time I sit down
to try and say goodbye, all I write down
is Dear City. My neighbor walks his dogs
past a monument to a president’s
terrier, Fala, forever bronzed. Washington
has no J Street, no Z, yet the city
maps attend to fifty states and a stretch
of five blocks NE Metro track—a stretch
named Puerto Rico Avenue. Bow down
to the unmapped names: Chocolate City,
Simple City. Ben serves up chili dogs
through a riot, and Walter Washington
is the first and last time a president
picks our mayor. The truth is, presidents
come and go, four or eight years at a stretch.
Barry said, I’m yours for life, Washington;
Emperor Marion, who could get down
with Chuck Brown. Later, reporters will dog
his Bitch set me up, his graft. Dear City,
will you let me claim you as my city?
To love you is to defy precedent.
Your quadrants hustle like a pack of dogs
around the hydrant Capitol. They stretch
and paw, they yap and will not settle down.
Traffic: the berry to Washington’s jam.
For city miles, Barry’s motorcade stretched.
We laid him among vice presidents, down
where the dogs seek congress in Washington.
PIGS IN SPACE
Landing at the Sea of Tranquility,
the clock calls for breakfast—
eight squares of bacon, coated in gelatin;
dehydrated peaches; apricot cereal cubes.
No salt on the loose, no spice,
fifteen cups of coffee per astronaut.
All this fine-tuned in the eight years
since Gemini pilot John Young’s pocket
revealed a corned beef sandwich
courtesy Wolfie’s of Cocoa Beach,
which he offered to Gus Grissom
as the crumbs broke away and floated
toward the fickle innards of the ship.
Now, everything bound into bar or pouch,
cocktail shrimp hand-selected to squeeze
one by one through the tubing.
Inventing the space taco will take
another two decades. Sturdy tortillas
will be fortified for shelf life,
glued together by creamed onions.
In 2008, Korean scientists will perfect
how to prepare kimchi
without the lactic bacterial fizz
that might, given cosmic rays,
just happen to mutate.
But we are not there yet,
and for days the Apollo 11 menu
has asked them to imagine one paste
as beef, another as chicken;
to discern first tuna, then salmon.
As they ready to step outside
the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin unscrews
a tiny vial drawn from his private pouch,
and the wine drapes at one-sixth gravity.
His fingertips grip a tiny chalice,
while the other hand places
a wafer on his tongue. During all this,
NASA cuts the feed. Soon they’ll return
to regularly scheduled acts of faith,
releasing hydrogen and oxygen
to mix inside the fuel cell:
from that, a gathering of water,
and from that, a chowder of corn.
BILOXI BA
CON
If Marc Chagall’s father
had hauled fish in Mississippi
instead of Vitebsk,
in his paintings
holy mullet would
wing over his rooftops—
mullet, on violin—rooster
and mullet, mullet and goat.
In his chapel of mullet-paned glass
we would gather
to watch each fish relay
the baton of its body
from wave to wave,
across a marathon of hunger.
The body, fried, cradled in grits.
Smoked body, lacquered in cane.
We save the gizzard,
the star-white milt,
while bridal roe bursts
with promise of morning.
When casting nets to the Gulf,
who are we to judge grace?
Chagall saw the wonder
of what sustains us: how one
can scavenge the bottom
and still rise, without apology,
by the silvered dozen.
RHYMES WITH
I stop off on Route 301 to debate
between quarter-bushel bags of oranges—
Temples and Ortaniques I’ll bring back
to the presser we bought cheap, scrubbed clean.
Wear-Ever, promises the stamped metal.
I have been in lust with Florida’s strange:
her match of pastel blue to forest green;
her north more Southern than her south;
how alligators and crocodiles share nine miles
of pond with one shore brackish, the other fresh.
Sporange, promises the dictionary.
Or Blorenge, a mountain in southeast Wales.
In moments like this I must pitch my stance
so that I don’t fall down the mountain,
into a Welsh valley,
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