on the slim flowers so well acquainted with the sun.
A dwarf could fit inside this door in my head and steal
every thought you’ve furnished. You say
I should never comb my hair, and it’s precisely why
my mother fears you. For house pets being American
is a cinch. For house pets being American is a guiltfree
luxury. Even when the bed is damp, the bedsheets
dizzy with lovemaking, I won’t brush my teeth.
And when the smell is impossible, I will remember my
brief career as an infant. And then I will remember calling you
from a phone booth beside a cow field on the eve of war.
The dwarf burns the house down, and I myself am mistaken
for fire. I would bite you. I would battle the specter of death
until YOU LOSE hovers on-screen in a bloodshot arcade.
I would eat the hot light spilling from the west.
I would eat even the birds I don’t trust, the rats with wings.
What’s up, homeboy? you say, all fray-colored and mythy.
I am thin as nothing I have a word for. Full of dissonance
and dwarfs decreeing rumors. Full of rancor and dissidence.
I was saying Feed me before you smoked the last cigarette.
Before you smelled of the contentment that is not a food at all.
IMAGINARY WEDDING SONG
You can never be a bride for more than a day
unless you are the bride of Moose County.
Or bride of the Sea Island Fair. Or the bride of altitudes.
Or the bride of scrimmages. Or the bride of a miner’s
lantern. The bride of eaves or the easy bride of naves.
The bride of the Second Avenue Glory Bound
Greater Covenant of Holiness in Christ Chapel
or bride of the Rock of Ages Full Gospel Sweet Home
House of Prayer. The bride of blistering scriptures.
The young bride of Doctor Roland Fumes, the pastor.
Or the bride of anchored earlobes and slapstick lipstick.
Bride of the affirmative girdle and transparent mantle.
You can never be a bride for more than a year
unless you are the bride of a flamboyant boy king,
princessed and pressed in something as white
as luxury. Or the bride of withering edicts.
Or the bride of John Shore’s windup contraptions.
Or the bride of Abraham Jones, the butcher.
The bride of Delfeyo Nekrumah and his handsome
handmade spears. Or the bride of Yukio Imaura
and the fish. The bride of James James Junior,
the eponymous. Or the bride of Wole Curtis, the masseur.
The bride a mile from the graveyard and the warmth
of good money. The bride of birthright hugging the finger.
You can never be a bride forever unless you are the bride
having control over death. Or the bride of the very last number.
The bride of communion on a pink sliver of tongue or the bride
of crucifixion on a slithery strap. The briefly new bride.
The bride of confections and sand in the mouth
of each pearl-studded slipper and sand in the mouth too,
lodged and gristling behind each rice-colored tooth.
The bride of vows that cannot be chewed.
The bride of falling water. The bride of spit in the sink
and spit on the mirror. A spoon brooding in the brew bride,
an onion stewing in the stew. The bored and tarnished bride
of a corset undone by what’s due and what “I do” makes you.
LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO PARENTING
To say there has not been a daughter born to my clan
for more than four generations is a truth almost as absolute
as the one about the speed at which the rain will fall
on this day a year from now. What’s more, none
of the children born to my clan in the last century
had a father to slump black and whipped as blackness
on a big couch and say, Come darlings, unstring my boots.
Remember when we believed everything the future told us?
Therefore, I suggest corporal punishment as a way
to establish the boundaries between youth and adulthood;
between you and your daughter. Do not hide or guard
the cheese and crackers or ask if she understands truly
the meaning of understanding. The moon, she notes, is God’s
nail clipping. Tell her, “Yes, you know nothing of Jesus
on the cross. Jesus at the crossroads. Jesus of the cross-
over, drive, and dunk: the team wins by one.”
“You don’t know nothing, the belt ain’t taught you.” Say that.
Remember when we were young enough to remember?
Remember when we believed everything evening told us?
It had been raining and then it wasn’t. There was a damp quiet
resting on the lapels of the maples and the daylily’s
monkish, which is to say idle, upturned face.
When you demand your child turn down the radio,
the only answer should be silence. If you are disciplined
with your discipline, he or she will love you
as he or she will someday love God, the theory goes.
When the darkness begins to really get dark, it will burn.
That’s not to say life is without its degree of jazz.
The rain might scat were it not for the sunlight.
The light might solo were it not for the rain.
And everything in that kind of compromise could be absolute.
GHAZAL-HEAD
You no-good fork sucker, that’s what.
You no-good backscratcher, that’s what.
A blue thumbnail. An old light fixture. A toylike hammer.
A glass or tumbler. Bend your fingers, that’s what.
You’re one of those sleepers. Those pod people
Poking their noses, those nose blowers, that’s what.
I could care less for your deluxe vacuum.
Suck your own luck, you no-good Hoover, that’s what.
Gulp, gulp, I yelled at sunset when I saw it walking
Across the room like a no-good rumor, that’s what.
No-count number. Indentured fender. Household cleanser.
Black-shoe cadaver. Beer belly dancer, that’s what.
And I know you know I know and could care less.
Them ailments into amens; angst into anger, that’s what.
Slow down, I told the boy with the knife.
Give me a hug, I told that mother hugger, that’s what.
I lied, what about it? I loitered too. Like dust.
I did what you did like a no-good mirror, that’s what.
What about it, po’ mouth? You no-good goody-goody.
What about it? I know what I said. Lover, that’s what.
I AM A BIRD NOW
When Antony a man like Nina
With a shook note corned in his quiver
Dolls a wig of light the way a wounded
Head is dolled and the song slung
From his grimace is no longer part
Of the body but shares some of its
History you know how I feel / the raw
Drawl drawn from the bottom of the throat
The hunger broken by what can and cannot
Heal in the much too dark to see
After the vase is asleep with the taste
Of the bit flower its moodiness and lust
You know how I feel / submerged
In a clouded jar altered and alert
The mind light-headed and hawked
Run-down and cloaked in awkwardness
You know what I sorrow when I lay
On your back Beloved an
d our lovemaking
With your back to me is a form
Of departure / you know how I feel
Terrestrial as a marriage like a wing
When it is no longer part of the body
Slung from a horn carved of metal
Slickened to shine a phrase winding coil
and the winded valves the song which aches
As it opens and aches as it shutters down
COCKTAILS WITH ORPHEUS
After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood
naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned
a gun (O Miss Geneva, where are you now?)—Orpheus says she did
not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found
a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and
a house, she was a decent wife. I know decent lives in the word
descent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands
me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind
I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound
as touch permits, saying don’t forget me when I become the liquid
out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet, and animal-made.
I want to be human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold
of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what’s left of the deed.
ARBOR FOR BUTCH
a pecha kucha after Martin Puryear
[VESSEL]
I am with my newborn son and the man blood says is my father
in a shit motel, and if each of us is, as I sometimes believe,
the room we inhabit, he is a bed used until it’s stained.
Even if I knew this first meeting was our last, I would
have nothing to offer beyond the life I have made without him.
[THICKET]
In the far south where history shades everything,
there are people who fear trees. I once heard an old man say
I may be black as a crow, but I’m white inside.
Nowhere else does the sky do what the sky does there,
where the graves are filled with dirt the color of fire.
[RAWHIDE CONE]
We drank whiskey until we were drunk as the couple in the photo
my mother gave me to show him, the boy and girl swaying
at the edge of my future. I watched my father curl on the bed
like a leaf drained of its greening as my child cried
the way rain cries when it is changed to steam.
[BOWER]
Because I believe the tree is a symbol of everything,
one of us was the bough reaching across the road as fumes
scorch its leaves. One of us was a door opening and closing
in the darkness, one of us was a boat being carried downstream.
[MAROON]
My father and I sat in a motel room beside a highway,
where his pickup was the shade of a bruise beneath the glow
of the vacancy sign. Where he and his talk began
to evaporate. We were two fathers watching the faces
of two sons where the evening passed as it arrived.
[LADDER FOR BOOKER T. WASHINGTON]
Where the rain comes, long-toed and crushing the high grass,
swamping the land; where a slave talked his children
out of running away with the bottom of his shoe.
This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.
[SANCTUARY]
In the far south where sap jewels the bark, the teeth
of the saws are sticky and bittersweet. But I wanted to carve
a door out of the wood, and around that door I wanted
to build a room, because I knew what my mother wished for
and I knew from far off what she would need.
[C.F.A.O.]
The arm of the boy falls around the girl heavy as a branch
in the photograph with the gloss that’s been rubbed
clean and the blurred inscription which nearly delivers
its message before vanishing. I drove the long night
to see the face my son and I wear like a mask.
[SELF]
Where history can be a downpour of joy or guilt spilling
its wrongheaded desire all over the body. Where
a boy and girl fought in a motel bed to make me, one desire
beating against another. Where my mother seemed to blur
calling him her first lover even after she said she was raped.
[BELIEVER]
In the far south my father, the first time I met him
said “God made nothing sweeter than pussy.” We smoked
our history, we drank to our future until each of us was
a head of steam, clouds above each other’s dreams.
[DOWAGER]
Where the plan was when I saw him to cut off his hands.
Where because of this man my mother would want me
dead, would want no limbs to branch inside her,
no cluster of sound waiting in a drum. Where
she wanted to, but could not shape her want into an ax.
[DEADEYE]
Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires
trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what
you identify, I thought, This is how the blood sings into the self.
I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music.
[BIG AND LITTLE SAME]
The first time I met my father I believed I would understand
the line connecting me to him, because a man rooted to his kin
can never be a slave. But he was like the road, skid-marked
and distant, like the rain breaking above ground and beating into it.
[SOME TALES]
In the far south where as one man swung from the limb
of a tree, he said, I may be as black as this bark,
but my heart is light. Where even when your lantern burns
out, they say the flame lasts. Where everyone I know
is ablaze with this story and darkened by its ash.
[RELIQUARY]
Certain arrangements must be made
if you want access to the past. With his room
without rooms and his truck without gas,
my father was a nail bent in the shaft of a hammer,
a wound the length of a kiss, a mouth bled of its power.
[CIRCUMBENT]
I am with the ones the blood says are mine, and if each of us is
as I sometimes believe, little more than a bray of nostalgia,
we are like the village mule chained to its muling. My father
fit a slim, ragged hand over the head of my newborn son
and said he sounds like a white child crying like that.
[MALEDICTION]
What if blackness is a fad? Dear Negritude, I live as you live,
waiting to be better than I am. Before sleep last night I thought
how it would be to awaken with all the colors of this world
turned inside out. And that was the name of my suffering.
[BASK]
The story my father told me did not reveal one body inside
another, the arms of the boy who would become my father
embracing the girl who would become my mother; it did not hold
the sentence rooted to the beginning of my life.
[OLD MOLE]
I am not doing anything now, except waiting like the bird
who uses the bones and feathers of other birds to build
its nest. I am on my bed of leaves thinking about the past,
how my father dragged his shadow across the room
the way a storm drags its rain.
[CONFESSIONAL]
Where there were too many
trees and too many names
etched into the trunks; where the knots in the wood
were the scars of old limbs; where, to be reborn, the birch pine
must be set aflame; where the door if I opened it might have
revealed the lovemaking or abuse still waiting to be named.
MULE HOUR
Ma and me ride a blue mule into the South, where cockroaches
dream of the apocalypse and weep each sunrise bright as grief.
And crushed, their insides are milky as moonlight banked in cloud.
Because between nightfall and morning, the roaches crawl all over
Dominion in their secondhand shoes making deals with the angel
of exile, who does not call the Lord his master and is nobody’s slave.
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