by Kevin Young
ALSO BY KEVIN YOUNG
POETRY
Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015
Book of Hours
Ardency
Dear Darkness
For the Confederate Dead
To Repel Ghosts: The Remix
Black Maria
Jelly Roll: A Blues
To Repel Ghosts
Most Way Home
NONFICTION
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
AS EDITOR
The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (with Michael S. Glaser)
Best American Poetry 2011
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing
Jazz Poems
John Berryman: Selected Poems
Blues Poems
Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by Kevin Young
Photographs © 2018 Melanie Dunea
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Young, Kevin, [date] author.
Title: Brown : poems / Kevin Young.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017029270 (print) | LCCN 2017030884 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781524732554 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732547 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Poetry | BISAC: POETRY / American /
African American. | POETRY / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3575.O798 (ebook) | LCC PS3575.O798 A6 2018 (print) |
DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029270
Ebook ISBN 9781524732554
Cover illustration by Jason Kernevich
Cover design by Kelly Blair
Illustration by Mack Young
v5.2
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Kevin Young
Title Page
Copyright
Thataway
HOME RECORDINGS
ONE: THE A TRAIN
Swing
Rumble in the Jungle
Open Letter to Hank Aaron
Mercy Rule
Slump
Stealing
Patter
Flame Tempered
Practice
The Division
Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
Ashe
Shirts & Skins
I doubt it
TWO: ON THE ATCHISON, TOPEKA & THE SANTA FE
Ad Astra Per Aspera
Western Meadowlark
American Bison
Sunflower
Phys. Ed.
Warm Up
Tumbling
Dodgeball
Bleachers
Practice
City
Ice Storm, 1984
History
Dictation
Booty Green
Brown
FIELD RECORDINGS
THREE: NIGHT TRAIN
James Brown at B. B. King's on New Year's Eve
Fishbone
Chuck Taylor All Stars
Checkerboard Vans
Creepers
Doc Martens
John Fluevogs
Lead Belly's First Grave
It
Ode to Big Pun
De La Soul Is Dead
Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard
FOUR: THE CRESCENT LIMITED
B. B. King Plays Oxford, Mississippi
Bass
Triptych for Trayvon Martin
Not Guilty (A Frieze for Sandra Bland)
Limbo (A Fresco for Tamir Rice)
Nightstick (A Mural for Michael Brown)
A Brown Atlanta Boy Watches Basketball on West 4th. Meanwhile, Neo-Nazis March on Charlottesville, Virginia.
Howlin' Wolf
Repast
Hospitality Blues
The Head Waiter's Lament
Reservations
Booker's Place
Waiting
Death's Dictionary
A Glossary of Uppity
Pining, A Definition
Sundaying
Whistle
Money Road
Hive
Notes & Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Thataway
And the migrants kept coming.
—JACOB LAWRENCE
Was walking. Was
walking & then waiting
for a train, the 12:40
to take us thataway.
(I got there early.)
Wasn’t a train
exactly but a chariot
or the Crescent Limited come
to carry me some
home I didn’t yet
know. There were those
of us not ready till good
Jim swung from a tree
& the white folks crowded
the souvenir photo’s frame—
let his body black-
en, the extremities
shorn—not shed,
but skimmed off
so close it can be shaving
almost. An ear
in a pocket, on a shelf,
a warning where a book
could go. So
I got there early.
See now, it was morning—
a cold snap, first frost
which comes even
here & kills the worms
out the deer. You can
hunt him then
but we never did want,
after, no trophy
crowned down
from a wall, watching—
just a meal, what
we might make last
till spring. There are ways
of keeping a thing.
Then there are ways
of leaving, & also
the one way. That
we didn’t want.
I got there early.
Luggage less sturdy
(cardboard, striped, black)
than my hat. Shoebox
of what I shan’t say
lunch on my lap.
The noise the rails made
even before the train.
A giant stomach growling.
A bowed belly. I did
not pray. I got there
early. It was not
no wish, but a way.
HOME RECORDINGS
“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”
—THE SCARECROW
The Wizard of Oz
ONE
The A Train
Swing
If, up early,
an hour no jazzster
never did see,
my son & I—
he’s three—
jump up to accompany
Mister Charlie
Christian on his six string,
listening to Swing
to Bop (Live), a recording cut
long after midnight—
my son plucky
on the tiny tourist
toy guitar his big sis
brought back from Fiji,
tapping his feet
while I rake
the plastic strings
of my ancient, resurrected
racquetball racquet
that showed up lately—
strumming the sun,
the morning
into being—my son
stopping to chase the dust
we can suddenly see
in the bright now falling—
his skinny legs
jangling—you’ll
maybe understand,
later, when he runs in
& asks,
Daddy,
what’s jazz?
I just point at him
& laugh.
Rumble in the Jungle
If you didn’t know
better, you might think
Muhammad was praying,
not talking smack—
arms up, Ali
leans way back
as if trying to catch
a glimpse
of the Almighty—
he’s told no one
his plan
to rope-a-dope—
to bend in whatever wind
Foreman sends
or knocks out of him.
Haymakers & body
blows. The thumbs
of his old-fashioned boxing gloves
upright like Ali
hopes to hitch a ride
to heaven. Instead he’s here
in Zaire, stuck waiting
for the monsoon—
playing possum
through seven rounds
till it’s time to climb & jab
his way off the ropes
like Tarzan sawing free
from a fishing net in a Saturday
matinee—swinging
till Foreman backstrokes
to the floor. Seven whole rounds
of reckoning—till a woman
in a dashiki, stepping lightly,
carries the card
for the next round filled
with what now
appears omen, inevitability—
for one moment
the number 8
knocked flat
on its side—
an infinity.
Open Letter to Hank Aaron
Your folded jersey said it
best: Brave. A bounty
on your head, last name a prophet’s,
first a king, you kept swinging
that hammer, Bad Henry, even after
the threats fell like hail.
Every barbershop’s expert
already knew you would best
Ruth’s sacred record, just
like they knew the Babe
was really black, ever
see that nose of his?
The hate mail you quit opening
kept coming, scrawled or sutured,
brushing you back more
than a Hoot Gibson inside pitch,
no return address—
the newspaper with your obit
already written, primed
to run. Still you swung
like a boxer in the late rounds
hoping to change the Judges’
minds—once you connect
& the ball barely sails
over the short porch in left,
you don’t so much run
as pace
around the bases—
nonchalant, nervous—a man
with too much cash
worrying his pockets, a windfall
he may never live
long enough to spend.
Rounding second,
two guys race
up to you, friend
or foe, clapping you
on the back—
I hear they’re doctors now—
as if you’d just been born.
Hopping the fence
like that ball did,
your mama
bear-hugs you
headed home. Think of it
as money,
the Bancard billboard
you cleared in left
field says. Not
that you did—
after, the microphones
aimed at your face
like arrows into a saint,
your face less belief
than relief—
I just thank God,
you say, it’s over with.
Falling back
into the crowd, unharmed,
you wave your blue arms.
Mercy Rule
The true test of a man is a bunt.
—TED BERRIGAN
[ SLUMP ]
The sting in your hands
swinging
a cracked bat
in early spring.
The anger of the one-armed boy
at bat, whiffing
at every lousy pitch
tossed in the dirt, or air
above him, eager—
it was hard
to watch. Swung out, he’d spike
& splinter his bat
into the giving ground,
arguing with his hand
& hook—cursing it,
himself, furious
as the sun that shined
setting in all our eyes.
[ STEALING ]
Only time
I ever heard
my eyes were any good
was watching a full
count pitch
just miss—
I’d take my base
before the ball’d
been called. Lead-off man,
righty, my strike zone
small enough
little squeezed through,
the ball a camel
needling impossible
into heaven. Hell,
I’d steal second standing—
would wait till
they tried throwing
me out at first, my long lead
a taunt, then head
to second
without a t
hought.
In that game
called pickle,
or hotbox, I rarely
got caught. I ran
like only the sly,
four-eyed can—to get there
& to get away—
to reach somewhere
safe, where I
never thought
to stay.
[ PATTER ]
When I played
in the Onandaga League,
Coach wouldn’t let us
patter like the others—
no Hey batter batter
Swing—
no nothing.
At the plate silence
greeted all comers—
prodigal sons
returned to the farm
& no arms thrown open
in welcome. Or alarm. Chatter
was rude, Coach said, & anyways
unnecessary. We were above
all those taunts—We want
a pitcher not
a belly itcher—
instead eerie quiet
met the Visitors
whenever we took the mound,
batters swinging into
a calm that would undo
most anyone who
thought noise worse
than its opposite,
that the storm
wouldn’t come.
[ FLAME TEMPERED ]
I only owned one bat,
my favorite,
Roberto Clemente’s name
burnt into the wood—