by Chris Abani
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For
Daphne
Anything beautiful about me was a gift from you.
I will see you in dreams and words.
Also, of course,
Sarah
Sanctificum (Latin): sanctify, make holy
Every true poet is a monster
TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
Terror is a state of complete understanding
LARRY LEVIS
Contents
Title Page
Note to the Reader
Om
Sacrament
Divination
A Letter to Robert Pinsky:
Revenant
Elephants
Dear Derek Walcott, Patron Saint of Shipwrecked Poets:
Descent
Dear Kimiko Hahn:
Processional
God’s Country
Pilgrimage
Benediction
Histories
Dear Yusef Komunyakaa:
Dew
Nomad
Renewal
About the Author
Books by Chris Abani
Links
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Om
1
The hills of my childhood are purple with dusk and wings —
guinea fowl launched like a prayer to the still forming moon.
I hold Bean’s shell to my ear. There is no sea.
But only sea. By my bed, in an empty chair, my shirt unwinds.
I remember my aunt counting the dead in the newspaper.
I never told anyone that every sliver of orange I ate
was preceded by words from high mass.
Per omnia saecula saeculorum.
Spit out pit. Amen.
Juice. Amen. Flesh.
2
A full moon leaning on a skyscraper. The taste:
qat and sweets on a tropical afternoon.
The dog’s black tongue was more terrifying than its teeth.
The gravestone rising out of the puddle was more sinister
than the body we discovered as children swinging
in the summer-hot orchard.
3
The old woman singing a dirge has a voice of dust.
Sorrow lodged like a splintered bullet next to the heart.
A man once asked me in the street:
Do you own your own bones?
She likes the home I come in, I say to Cristina
as we drive toward the Golden Gate.
Bean, I repeat.
She loves the home I come in
and I am alive with fire and scars.
Here is my body, I say, eat it, do this,
remember me —
4
Even now melancholy is a skin flayed
and worn in dance through the city.
Yes, the city becomes skin too and wears me
as skin and I want to say, This is my body, as I stroke
the curve of the fountain in the park.
This is my blood. Drink it. Remember.
The safety of doorways is an illusion.
They lead nowhere.
This is why we build houses.
Sand, when there is no water, can ablute,
washing grain by grain even the hardest stone of sin.
But you, but you, you are a sin that I live for.
Ne Me Quitte Pas. Ne Me Quitte Pas. Ne Me Quitte Pas.
Nina’s voice walks in dragging bodies,
dead black men that bled unseen in the dark
of southern nights, shaded by leaves
and the veiled eyes of hate.
And in a poem, Lucille stands in the shadow of a tree
and pours libations for our souls,
for our salt, for our gospel.
5
Somewhere a man speaks
in the dark, voice lost to rain.
I know this hunger, this need
to make patterns, to build meaning
from detritus; also the light
and the wood floor bare but for the lone slipper
tossed carelessly to one side. I admit the lies I’ve told.
Look, nothing has been true
since that picture of hell on the living-room wall lost its terror.
I say I want a strong woman, but unlike Neto
I cannot have the woman and the fish.
The war followed.
Children are losing their souls to the heat.
That is to say, poor American soldiers.
The rich have found a way to charge theirs to Amex.
Ask this: what is the relationship of desire to memory?
Here is a boy in the airport café, hair cropped from service.
And he closes his eyes to take a sip of coffee.
And smiles as the dark washes the desert away.
6
Los Angeles:
A red sky and angels thick like palm trees,
and garbage blown in the wind like cars
and the gluttony of SUVs
in an endless river of traffic.
Through the dark, we say, through the dark:
but do we ever really know?
There is a man in a field and he is searching for God.
Father, he says, Father.
In the distance, birds, traffic, and children.
There is a blue sky. There is a sky blue with night.
The call of the earth is a primitive song,
stomping feet and broken men.
There is a blue sky. And night.
The city is a flock of lights.
The darkness of tunnels like caves is knowledge,
also mortal. Maps are like God.
They are the city yet not the city.
They contain the city but yet do not.
We trace the lines in loss.
Sometimes we find treasure.
Sometimes something fills the mind,
something at which we pause, stopped.
The way a photograph cannot remember the living.
7
To die is to return.
To fly is to be a bird’s heart.
Neither is freedom.
If it were we would have no name for it.
No language. Not even the temptation of wind
blowing a dark woman’s hair away from a cliff’s edge.
Instead, feathers are brought to my door every day by mystery.
Kindling for a fire, a beacon, an epiphany I cannot light.
This is the body of Christ.
Sanctificum.
Sacrament
1
Have you heard of the oracle of the Igbo?
The one called Chukwu? Just one word: God.
The oracle of God.
The voice of God.
The final arbitration.
Kpom kwem.
Deep in a grove of trees, the sacred lake,
and rising in the gloom and heat,
mist, the very breath of divinity.
The unbearable trepidation,
the worship, the sheer terror and earnestness
trembling the supplicants. And the priests
sitting on rocks and in trees on haunches,
silent like vultures or Rilke’s unspeakable angels.
And then a pilgrim wades cautiously into the lake.
On the shore, the line of unannointed
shivers in a shared awe.
And if the petitioner is beautiful or strong,
the priests hold her under, then shackled,
for slavers. In the lake, red dye bubbles up
as God smacks his lips.
And that endless line of believers near faint
with the fearsome beauty of the thought:
Please consume me, God.
Consume me and find me worthy.
But don’t let me die.
2
There is risk in this —
Not in the words, but the dreaded embodiment of light,
a sacred song. A river darker
than caverns immeasurable,
a sacred river; not all Ganga, not all Alph,
but still fire, still fire.
Before this flight, before this persistence
the soul is bare.
Holy the water.
Holy the smoke.
Holy the flame.
Holy, holy, holy.
3
Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets
in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn
for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk.
If there is a way it is here.
Salt and ash.
This is how the Igbo clean their teeth.
Grandmother grinding charcoal
coughing as the silt rises.
Then salt rubbed into the black
as though morning were trying to temper night.
Then water and a fingertip collecting the gray,
the unidentifiable finger dipping into
a mouth held open like a wound —
A thick sludge complicates my joy.
It is made of the dissolved bones and flesh
of men we buried in swamps
behind the walls of internment. Buried
in shallow graves like a hand cupped in peat,
then bodies and lime: the hiss and sizzle, and the suck
of earth filling with water.
Of swamp digesting histories and love.
Instead of a preface, instead of a requiem,
the symphony of rain fills the night
with the distracted hurry of wild horses
crossing a plateau under a threatening sky.
I am not afraid of love, or its consequence of light,
Joy intones, chant like skin, like sand, like water.
4
There is fog this morning. On my continent
children die. African children die every day.
It’s what they do.
I can still hear my mother’s sewing machine
stitching the afternoon with promise. Under a tree,
in the scent of rotting fruit, I washed
bitter-leaf for dinner. Washed and squeezed.
The bitter foaming away.
Like frothy green blood from the neck of sacrifice.
A dog is barking at spirits in the heat.
Language escapes me still — see it sprinting
down the street. Crazed. A crazy man.
Babbling. Babel. This is my language.
On a wall in Sarajevo, graffiti reads:
KILLING IS MY BUSINESS
BUSINESS IS GOOD. THE FROGMAN.
Sem gave me the book with the graffiti.
In D.C. he said, My name is Sem,
eyes narrowed, even as his lips smiled.
I know this trim. A name for invisibility.
A loss for a chance to be here.
Do I not carry a pocketful of accents?
In halting speech I said it wrong: Semezdin Mehmedinović.
He smiled as though I were singing an aria.
We went back to coffee, the dark, and rain:
a Washington, D.C., street and the glow of lights.
Agi Mishol said, Choose your rebbe carefully.
Someone who sees who you can become.
I doubt there is anything like truth here in this tea shop
but the chai is good and the light on Bean is golden.
Divination
1
How can a people who have paid such a price
for life, return from the grave with such vengeance?
And who will count the Palestinian dead?
And who mourns for them? Stones and steel
and mortar bombs will break my bones.
In Bean’s voice, Aygi returns as a girl
slender with olive in her eyes and a smile —
and snow, again snow, the cadence soft, falling.
Text message to Bean sent from my phone:
Ronald Reagan Airport.
Departure Gate —
I hope you get this.
Through night and rain and a plane.
Things wear the musk of elegy.
And maybe even a ghost. A double
rising like light from a wet road.
By an African roadside, a woman
more skeleton than flesh squats.
Death wears down her resistance.
The sun tries to be merciful.
2
I don’t know why I sing
in languages I cannot understand.
Fast-moving trains draw time ahead and
then there is the sea and the blue kite of horizon;
a perfect chalice for night
and the communion sliver of moon.
I am driving to Santa Barbara.
The sun this afternoon is a fallen angel, but beautiful.
Zora said, “Black people are art.”
Hallowed be thy name.
Which is to say, there is no end to ocean,
no article to limit. As for dream, he is a man
with dark robes and a gaunt face and sigh so weary
it makes the nightmare tedious. Every night he is waiting.
He doesn’t think it funny when I laugh at the crow on his shoulder.
You said Mother would no longer make you sad. I believed you.
Yet over and over I wash the two dresses a woman left
after she was done with me. The smell is summer.
3
Even in the agony of waiting —
this is the way she loves the dream.
And what woke me was the scent. Like the smell
of coffee my mother beat from the folds of her day dress.
There is a small girl shivering in a stream
as her brothers keep watch from the lip of a wooden bridge,
while behind them, mere inches from their buttocks,
cars pass. Each counted in an arc of spit, each
boy puckering fast to win the count.
Their legs’ kicking casually over the abyss belies their fear.
If you know sorrow, you know it hurts in the body.
I project my hope into the streets of South Africa.
4
No I am not afraid of the eye chart:
in THE dmv
But i sHakE
at The Uniformed
COP who WaLks In.
My fear of uniforms is an old habit, comfortable.
Sometimes even the chief fryer at McDonald’s can
make me
break into a hot sweat if I am not expecting his glance.
Monsters don’t crowd your psyche
but rather sit awkwardly on the remote control,
too polite to get up and move it, until
the constantly changing channel is unbearable.
The odds are that my political views won’t stop the invasion,
but to drink Ethiopian coffee during a bomb-
storm is still rebellious.
A LETTER TO ROBERT PINSKY:
This is wood, enchanted wood.
Still the fire scorches and we say wood
still the pain burns from the club
and then we say wood
still the planks dovetail and we caress
the smooth and the rough
sensuous, delectable, and yet sorrowful
and then we say wood.
Revenant
1
Jefferson Elementary wants a name change
because Jefferson owned slaves. Sequoia
Elementary, they say. Chief
Sequoyah and the Cherokee nation owned 1,500 black slaves.
What kind of avatar cannot save a moth
from the crush of a wheelchair?
Absence births an ache.
Late at night when I can’t sleep I draw plans
for the radio Christopher Leibow placed
on his father’s grave.
I am unable to love my father, so this.
It is so exhausting to hate the dead.
Of course it is dangerous.
Every angel dies like this,
wings spread like rugs for God’s feet.
2
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin:
Tall slabs of concrete forget what has been made.
Darkness irrigates narrow alleys between the forest
of stones. This might be a new Stonehenge.
I feel I will never escape from here.
This is knowledge, also guilt.