Sanctificum

by Chris Abani

  water and wine. Amen.

  But the death of our mothers is annihilation.

  There is no particular reason to believe me.

  7

  When has death ever been silent?

  The watchword is not mute, the cry comes from the deep.

  I want to go further, but I am afraid.

  There are ways in which the memory of my prison

  is nothing more than a scarf trailing from the hand of

  a child leaning over the side of a pier, signaling

  to gulls, and surf, and indifferent waves,

  before being snatched by the wind.

  And though I have tears, I am grateful, too.

  On the boardwalk the Jimi Hendrix look-alike smiles.

  This is no time for hemlock.

  8

  Every creation myth begins with land.

  And gods plant us where we are with the help of

  others that cannot be named.

  I have made a talisman of my hope.

  It is the glimmer of light from a house lost in the woods.

  I have a cousin who walks with a shuffle.

  It was cruel to think she was slow.

  It is simply what circumcision does to some women.

  I am looking for the words to say this.

  But I remain a man, you see.

  The knife is firmly in my hand.

  God’s Country

  1

  I wonder if my brother Greg remembers the throb

  of the horse he rode, muscles and hair between his legs.

  Or did he forget when he saw it killed for ritual,

  blood spilled for love, for honor, for duty.

  He was ten.

  We don’t talk about it.

  Half-used matchbooks litter my life.

  Am I afraid to lose the light?

  Ask yourself, what does it mean to see only the dark?

  I know what I am talking about.

  After six months in a hole in the ground,

  the prison is not the building, or the bars, or the beatings,

  or the denials, or the lies, or the forgetting, or the negotiating —

  It is the small door in your mind closing.

  All cremation ovens are set to

  the temperature it takes to burn the heart.

  It just won’t die.

  2

  There is no native land.

  We are always on a platform

  waiting for a train that almost never comes.

  The express screaming through the station is a dragon.

  Sometimes snow, sometimes sun. Sometimes we say,

  This is my station. In truth it is all journey.

  No one gives and no one takes.

  The true miracle is that love happens all the time.

  If there is a native land this is its geography.

  I believe in God. There I said it.

  This only proves I am Nigerian.

  Victor had the only monkey I’ve met with a last name:

  Mr. Modestus Tempo, Esq.

  She turned out to be a girl.

  This is the problem with naming.

  3

  Endlessly, poets lyric snow, again snow.

  A glass of water on a hot day. Now there’s a miracle.

  “Ode to a Girl Soldier.”

  Look away, look away.

  Mercifully the commercial always runs.

  “Ode to America.”

  A man in Camden is dealing

  leaves of grass by Whitman’s house.

  I am often on the wrong platform.

  I am often on the opposite platform.

  It is lonely here.

  Those who go against the herd get eaten.

  This is the way of lions and herds,

  and solitary wildebeests. We follow whatever path we must.

  I know a brilliant man who is more beautiful when

  he sings in the shower with his girlfriend.

  Love songs are a peculiar sadness.

  Words can scuttle any ship. Ask Ahab.

  To die is to return.

  What can be said about chicken hearts left to dry

  in a deep sun: brown and hard as stones?

  When we say love we mean, I want.

  When we say sorry we mean, forgive me.

  There is little room for anyone else.

  But Bean, she loves me.

  How else can she keep forgiving me?

  Pilgrimage

  1

  Nothing as definite as prayer.

  A hand cups a shadow.

  A heart is laid bare, open as a flower.

  Somewhere between care and cacophony

  Los Angeles is alive.

  The city tonight stands outside of everything.

  We come to night.

  We come to light.

  The city is a liar.

  May I find my way.

  Los Angeles is a dream we cannot bear.

  I think of streets black as any river, and beer.

  Over loud music a woman calls to her lover.

  There is no truth here.

  The city is awash with lights.

  Even this sacrifice will not save us.

  I say hibiscus and mean innocence.

  I say guava and mean childhood.

  I say mosquito netting and I mean loss.

  I say father and it means only that.

  Happen that we all dream, but the sea is only sea.

  Happen that we call upon God but it is only a breeze

  ruffling a prayer book in a small church

  where benches groan in the heat.

  Outside a peacock will not be quiet.

  There are so many ways I could undo the night

  my father expired if only I could

  find the fastenings of time.

  Here the green grass is green even with the abundance

  of home, even with the weight of exile.

  There is a tree in my father’s backyard under which

  my umbilical is buried. There is no metaphor here.

  Bathing on a zinc sheet one night, I sliced my ankle

  to bleed my umbilical again.

  Look, there is a simple math to loss, to self, to aubergines.

  I can sing my father’s lineage back half a millennia

  but here in Starbucks I struggle with Oprah

  to find myself. Which is to say,

  I could accept the labels before me,

  but only a deeper cut will suffice.

  I am not an American, though I want to be.

  I am not a Nigerian even though I have the melancholy.

  I am something deeper still.

  For now, Igbo, a placeholder. Also sometimes,

  Druid, on my mother’s side. And a red passport.

  People say, Christ, if I’d seen what you’ve seen.

  Christ! Mercy! Jesus!

  This is my cry, too. I have seen, but I am still lost.

  The fog will not part no matter how long I strike

  my staff against stone.

  There are slavers in my ancestry, slaves too.

  Some nights I wake with the bitter of rusty chains

  on my tongue, a whip in my hand.

  Avatars come and go and come again.

  There is only a map fading in the harsh sun.

  Some may call me a pessimist, but I am not.

  There is nothing gained from loss.

  I drink tea in the shade and believe in poetry.

  I am a zealot for optimism.

  2

  Every river is Jordan for the faithful.

  They came to the holy mountain by my college.

  They climbed for days in their white robes.

  They looked like a flock of egrets

  resting in the heat and green.

  Can a new sky be born?

  Nothing I tell you will slake your thirst.

  But Pepsi at a baseball game comes close.

  If I mourn for al
l the suffering in the world,

  then I have only my ego to blame.

  I mourn daily. How can I not?

  Let there be love.

  There are 20 strings in a Myanmar marionette.

  There are 54 ethnic groups in Vietnam.

  There are 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria.

  There are 100 petals on a blossom of

  a Japanese Kikuzakura cherry tree.

  Diwali lasts for only 5 days.

  Then the lights dim and we forget.

  3

  In Siena the bells toll to mark the hour.

  Outside birds sing. Also scooters whine.

  In Nigeria they were ridden by insurance agents

  in white shirts. Kids would scream, “American Life Mutual,”

  as they kicked up dust in their whiny trail.

  As they say in France, C’est la vie.

  I am like a man climbing a mountain but taking in

  none of the view.

  I don’t know what faith is but

  I know this much —

  I want to put my fingers in the wounds and swirl them around.

  Thomas has nothing on me.

  I was seduced as a boy by frankincense

  And smoke

  And altar lights

  And Latin mass

  And robes

  And wafers and wine

  And wooden pews dark with sweat

  And confessionals musty with lies

  And rosary beads worried for a vision

  Then Buddha and the romance of Tibet.

  If Zeno’s paradox reveals anything it is not that

  space and time can be divided into infinity infinitely,

  but simply this:

  That we can only approximate the object of our desire.

  That we are always on a train traveling to happiness.

  But what we do reach are coffee, biscotti, and Bob on the iPod.

  Alexandria, in Egypt, is both a city and a library —

  Hope and destination.

  The world is often like this.

  Some things look like blood, some

  even taste like mud and rust.

  They are not blood. They are not.

  4

  And God stands in disdain as we supplicate.

  If love is your nature you will find it.

  The frayed carpet and plastic covered chairs

  were the stage for my aunt’s faith.

  Dipping harddough bread into milky sweet tea

  she unleashed her anger at the world in prayer.

  In another life she could have been a dancer.

  In this one, she is a Christian.

  In Zimbabwe, Mugabe betrays a people

  who make excuses for him.

  This is what it is to be a president in Africa.

  FUCK YOU HIGH QUALITY — bathroom graffiti, Siena.

  In Nazi Germany, a student resistance group called

  White Rose. Who knew?

  Their slogan: Wir Schweigen Nicht.

  We, too, will not be silent.

  In June and July 1994, O.J. made the cover of Newsweek.

  By the time the Rwandan genocide made the cover

  in August, one million were dead. Four million displaced.

  5

  Let me know this, too:

  The sting of orange zest in my eyes.

  And chocolate, decadent and truffled.

  And dancing.

  And milk fresh and bubbling from a goat.

  And the wind holding me as I free-fall from a plane.

  And wonder at a goldfish’s infinite curiosity.

  And cats

  and dogs.

  And a child’s hand brushing my face.

  And wings.

  And still rain

  and still rain.

  6

  The root of the word salary is sal. Salt.

  To be paid in salt.

  Salt is the weight, salt is the worth, salt is this body.

  Say pepper, say amen.

  Some people are necromancers —

  They summon repeatedly the body of their pain.

  Sometimes I am like that; dissecting the dead.

  Sometimes I am merely a practitioner of nostalgia.

  Like those heady Nigerian afternoons filled with munching

  sugarcane, the molding of fufu for the dip

  into stew, fingers fishing for morsels of delight,

  the cold slake of coconut water fresh from a nut.

  Good fiction is simply the capacity to remember

  your life, and yet simultaneously realize

  you are inventing every memory.

  When I was a child,

  South Africa was a story about men

  so deep into the despair of a bottle,

  dreams dark as the coal they worked.

  When I was a child,

  vampires lived behind the water tank, skirted

  by the modesty of elegant green bamboo.

  Now as a man, in the café in Siena, I declare:

  Those fucking Germans, those fucking Germans,

  so what is my excuse now?

  7

  It is easy to forget the decadence of glass.

  How some of us find it only in fragments.

  The glass between us and the world

  is often the measure of our wealth.

  Looking out at the world through it

  colors the hunger beyond.

  8

  Growing up, Emeka was albino.

  How we feared his pink skin and red eyes.

  How we loathed him.

  To my shame, I never ate with him,

  saying: I just ate,

  And to my sister under my breath:

  He disgusts me.

  She never told on me, but made me wait

  while she ate with him

  — same plate, no utensils —

  her eyes never leaving mine.

  9

  Courage is often invisible:

  Old women who buy their own groceries.

  Mothers who become shadow.

  Women who speak and speak and are not heard

  until a man says, Of course, of course.

  Children walking through minefields.

  Palestinians who don’t throw stones,

  wanting only food and life for their children.

  Palestinians who throw stones,

  wanting only food and life for their children.

  Israelis who eat in cafés.

  People who feed the homeless.

  People who don’t feed the homeless,

  but love their children well.

  People who love people.

  Who love animals.

  Young people who will not be fettered.

  Old people who will not die quietly.

  Women who dance with wolves.

  Women who care for the dying.

  People who speak of rage and abuse.

  People who suffer pain with a smile.

  People who suffer pain loudly.

  People who speak up for their beliefs.

  Children who protect other children.

  Homeless children who smile.

  People who have to navigate worlds designed,

  consciously or not, to keep them out.

  Being black anywhere in the twenty-first century.

  10

  In Siena, in a beautiful café on Piazza del Campo

  drinking coffee while Eastern European refugees beg,

  a man says to me: Literature in Italy is not like it is in Nigeria.

  There is no suffering here. We have no problems to fight.

  The clock on the tower says 4 p.m.

  What can be said to a man listening to Bob Marley

  on a train speeding through Tuscany?

  11

  To see the Verrazano Bridge disappear into fog

  on a sunny Brooklyn day.

  12

  Tonight I am waiting, alone,


  in my hotel room. I am not waiting

  for a lover, imagined or real.

  I am waiting for my father.

  Which is to say, my dead father.

  What I want to understand is overwhelming.

  The way a trapdoor in the floor holds nightmare.

  I have lost all sense of scale.

  The father I wait for is not real.

  He is not the man who died five years ago.

  And yet he cannot bend into metaphor.

  I want to say I love him.

  Barthes would say I do:

  You do because you are waiting.

  The way a plane cuts through clouds.

  Like the mandarin waiting for the courtesan for ninety-nine days.

  Like Blake setting a place for God.

  Like the Red Vines I try to wrap around my rage.

  The tender gesture says: ask me anything.

  Benediction

  1

  Let me tell you about sorrow.

  A mother wandering down a street calling

  for a child while planes scream overhead.

  And bullets around her cutting down goats,

  and trees and men and women and finally her,

  and in the dust, just out of reach of her dead hand,

  her son’s severed head.

  And somewhere, someone is wailing.

  Let me tell you about hate.

  A bayonet on the end of a rifle run through

  a teenager’s bony chest by a swarthy soldier

  frothing from the pleasure of it, amazed

  at the sound of it, flesh sucking on metal.

  And this boy dying and

  his eyes do not lose their burn,

  staring at his killer as though to say,

  Do it, do it now because I will do it to you,

  and even as I die, I am doing it to you.

  Let me tell you about love.

  Suheir on a rooftop in Jersey City cries into her cell.

  They won’t stop coming, she says.

  E-mail after e-mail after e-mail.

  And in them they are dying, or dead or afraid.

  And I can’t hold it, can’t hold it.

  We are talking about Lebanon and Gaza.

  In Los Angeles I make soothing sounds,

  as I fill the pot for coffee. I wonder

  if I will still be able to watch CSI.