Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

by Yusef Komunyakaa

  on books, magazines, & clothes

  flung to the studio’s floor,

  his sweat still owning the air.

  Years ago you followed someone

  here, in love with breath

  kissing the nape of your neck,

  back when it was easy to be

  at least two places at once.

  A TRANSLATION OF SILK

  One can shove his face against silk

  & breathe in centuries of perfume

  on the edge of a war-torn morning

  where men fell so hard for iron

  they could taste it. Now, today,

  a breeze disturbs a leafy pagoda

  printed on slow cloth. A creek

  begins to move. His brain trails,

  lagging behind his fingers to learn

  suggestion is more than radiance

  shaped to the memory of hands,

  that one of the smallest creatures

  knows how to be an impressive god.

  A flounce of light is the only praise

  it ever receives. I need to trust

  this old way of teaching a man

  to cry, & I want to believe in

  what’s left of the mulberry leaves.

  Humans crave immortality, but oh,

  yes, to think worms wove this

  as a way to stay alive in our world.

  DEAD RECKONING

  Fishermen follow a dream of the biggest

  catch, out among the tall waves where

  freshwater meets a salty calmness.

  For hundreds of years they’ve crossed

  this body of water, casting their nets

  & singing old songs. They’ve slept

  with the village women & ridden waves

  back to the other side to loved ones.

  Now, lost in the old clothes of unreason

  & wanderlust, their nets sag with the last

  of its kind, with bountiful fish stories,

  & soon the flirtatious mermaids are

  beckoning from a swoon of reeds,

  calling their names. The first dance

  is desire. The second dance is love.

  The tall grass quivers like a siren

  snagged in a shabby net. Now,

  as if on a journey of lost souls,

  love & desire dance with death,

  twirling bright skirts till flesh & cloth

  turn into ashes. What did they do

  to make the gods angry? Forbidden

  laughter of the mermaids fills the night,

  & if humans try to sing this laughter,

  their voices only cry out in the dark.

  CAPE COAST CASTLE

  I made love to you, & it loomed there.

  We sat on the small veranda of the cottage,

  & listened hours to the sea talk.

  I didn’t have to look up to see if it was still there.

  For days, it followed us along polluted beaches

  where the boys herded cows

  & the girls danced for the boys,

  to the money changer,

  & then to the marketplace.

  It went away when the ghost of my mother

  found me sitting beneath a palm,

  but was in the van with us on a road trip to the country

  as we zoomed past thatch houses.

  It was definitely there when a few dollars

  exchanged hands & we were hurried

  through customs, past the guards.

  I was standing in the airport in Amsterdam,

  sipping a glass of red wine, half lost in Van Gogh’s

  swarm of colors, & it was there, brooding in a corner.

  I walked into the public toilet, thinking of W.E.B.

  buried in a mausoleum, & all his books & papers

  going to dust, & there it was, in that private moment,

  the same image: obscene because it was built

  to endure time, stronger than their houses & altars.

  The seeds of melon. The seeds of gumbo in trade winds

  headed to a new world. I walked back into the throng

  of strangers, but it followed me. I could see the path

  slaves traveled, & I knew when they first saw it

  all their high gods knelt on the ground.

  Why did I taste salt water in my mouth?

  We stood in line for another plane,

  & when the plane rose over the city

  I knew it was there, crossing the Atlantic.

  Not a feeling, but a longing. I was in Accra

  again, gazing up at the vaulted cathedral ceiling

  of the compound. I could see the ships at dusk

  rising out of the lull of “Amazing Grace,” cresting

  the waves. The governor stood on his balcony,

  holding a sword, pointing to a woman

  in the courtyard, saying, That one.

  Bring me that tall, ample wench.

  Enslaved hands dragged her to the center,

  then they threw buckets of water on her,

  but she tried to fight. They pinned her to the ground.

  She was crying. They prodded her up the stairs. One step,

  & then another. Oh, yeah, she still had some fight in her,

  but the governor’s power was absolute. He said,

  There’s a tyranny of language in my fluted bones.

  There’s poetry on every page of the Good Book.

  There’s God’s work to be done in a forsaken land.

  There’s a whole tribe in this one, but I’ll break them

  before they’re in the womb, before they’re conceived,

  before they’re even thought of. Come, up here,

  don’t be afraid, up here to the governor’s quarters,

  up here where laws are made. I haven’t delivered

  the head of Pompey or John the Baptist

  on a big silver tray, but I own your past,

  present, & future. You’re special.

  You’re not like the others. Yes,

  I’ll break you with fists & cat-o’-nine.

  I’ll thoroughly break you, head to feet,

  but, sister, I’ll break you most dearly

  with sweet words.

  BLACK FIGS

  Because they tasted so damn good, I swore

  I’d never eat another one, but three seedy little hearts

  beckoned tonight from a green leaf-shaped saucer,

  swollen with ripeness, ready to spill a gutty

  sacrament on my tongue. Their skins too smooth

  to trust or believe. Shall I play Nat King Cole’s

  “Nature Boy” or Cassandra’s “Death Letter”

  this Gypsy hour? I have a few words to steal

  back the taste of earth. I know laughter can rip

  stitches, & deeds come undone in the middle of a dance.

  Socrates talked himself into raising the cup to his lips

  to toast the avenging oracle, but I told the gods no

  false kisses, they could keep their ambrosia & nectar,

  & let me live my days & nights. I nibble each globe,

  each succulent bud down to its broken-off stem

  like a boy trying to make a candy bar last

  the whole day, & laughter unlocks my throat

  when a light falls across Bleecker Street

  against the ugly fire escape.

  FATA MORGANA

  I could see thatch boats. The sea

  swayed against falling sky. Mongolian

  horses crested hills, helmets edging the perimeter,

  & I saw etched on the horizon scarab insignias.

  The clangor of swords & armor echoed

  & frightened scorpions into their holes,

  & the question of zero clouded the brain.

  I saw three faces of my death foretold.

  I sat at a table overflowing with muscadine & quince,

  but never knew a jealous husband poisoned the Shir
az.

  I laughed at his old silly joke about Caligula

  lounging in a bathhouse made of salt blocks.

  I was on a lost ship near the equator,

  & only a handful of us were still alive,

  cannibal judgment in our eyes.

  I came to a restful valley of goats & dragon lizards,

  but only thought of sand spilling from my boots.

  I witnessed the burning of heretics near an oasis,

  & dreamt of gulls interrogating sea horses, cuttlefish,

  & crabs crawling out of the white dunes.

  I could see the queen of scapegoats

  donning a mask as palms skirted the valley.

  I was lost in a very old land, before Christ

  & Muhammad, & when I opened my eyes

  I could see women embracing a tribunal

  of gasoline cans. I heard a scuttling

  on the seafloor. I knew beforehand

  what surrender would look like after

  long victory parades & proclamations,

  & could hear the sounds lovemaking

  brought to the cave & headquarters.

  ENGLISH

  When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning,

  & someone ran knocking on our door

  one night. The house became birds

  in the eaves too low for a boy’s ears.

  I heard a girl talking, but they weren’t words.

  I knew one good thing: a girl

  was somewhere in our house,

  speaking slow as a sailor’s parrot.

  I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland.

  Her voice smelled like an orange,

  though I’d never peeled an orange.

  I knocked on the walls, in a circle.

  The voice was almost America.

  My ears plucked a word out of the air.

  She said, Friend. I eased open the door

  hidden behind overcoats in a closet.

  The young woman was smiling at me.

  She was teaching herself a language

  to take her far, far away,

  & she taught me a word each day to keep secret.

  But one night I woke to other voices in the house.

  A commotion downstairs & a pleading.

  There are promises made at night

  that turn into stones at daybreak.

  From my window, I saw the stars

  burning in the river brighter than a big

  celebration. I waited for her return,

  with my hands over my mouth.

  I can’t say her name, because it was

  dangerous in our house so close to the water.

  Was she a boy’s make-believe friend

  or a beehive breathing inside the walls?

  Years later my aunts said two German soldiers

  shot the girl one night beside the Vistula.

  This is how I learned your language.

  It was long ago. It was springtime.

  POPPIES

  These frantic blooms can hold their own

  when it comes to metaphor & God.

  Take any name or shade of irony, any flowery

  indifference or stolen gratitude, & our eyes,

  good or bad, still run up to this hue.

  Take this woman sitting beside me,

  a descendant of Hungarian Gypsies

  born to teach horses to dance & eat sugar

  from her hand, does she know beauty

  couldn’t have protected her, that a poppy

  tucked in her hair couldn’t have saved her

  from those German storm troopers?

  This frightens me. I see eyes peeping

  through narrow slats of cattle cars

  hurrying toward forever. I see “Jude”

  & “Star of David” scribbled across a depot,

  but she says, That’s the name of a soccer team,

  baby. Red climbs the hills & descends,

  hurrying out to the edge of a perfect view,

  & then another, between white & violet.

  It is a skirt or cape flung to the ground.

  It is old denial worked into the soil.

  It is a hungry new vanity that rises

  & then runs up to our bleating train.

  I am a black man, a poet, a bohemian,

  & there isn’t a road my mind doesn’t travel.

  I also have my cheap, one-way ticket

  to Auschwitz & know of no street or footpath

  death hasn’t taken. The poppies rush ahead,

  up to a cardinal singing on barbed wire.

  ORPHEUS AT THE SECOND GATE OF HADES

  My lyre has fallen & broken,

  but I have my little tom-toms.

  Look, do you see those crows

  perched on the guardhouse?

  I don’t wish to speak of omens,

  but sometimes it’s hard to guess.

  Life has been good the past few years.

  I know all seven songs of the sparrow,

  & I feel lucky to be alive. I woke up at 2:59

  this morning reprieved because I fought

  dream catchers & won. I’ll place a stone

  into my mouth & go down there again,

  & if I meet myself mounting the stairs

  it won’t be the same man descending.

  Doubt has walked me to the river’s edge

  before. I may be ashamed, but I can’t forget

  how to mourn & praise on the marimba.

  I shall play till the day’s golden machinery

  stops between the known & unknown.

  The place was a funeral pyre for the young

  who died before knowing the thirst of man

  or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair

  wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine

  in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture

  poised over Tityus’s liver. I could see

  Ixion strapped to a gyrating wheel

  & Sisyphus sat on his rounded stone.

  I shall stand again before Proserpine

  & King Pluto. When it comes to defending love,

  I can make a lyre drag down the moon & stars

  but it’s still hard to talk of earthly things—

  ordinary men killing ordinary men,

  women, & children. I don’t remember

  exactly what I said at the ticket office

  my first visit here, but I do know it grew

  ugly. The classical allusions didn’t

  make it any easier. I played a tune

  that worked its way into my muscles,

  & I knew I had to speak of what I’d seen

  before the serpent drew back its head.

  I saw a stall filled with human things, an endless

  list of names, a hill of shoes, a room of suitcases

  tagged to nowhere, eyeglasses, toothbrushes,

  baby shoes, dentures, ads for holiday spas,

  & a wide roll of thick cloth woven of living hair.

  If I never possessed these reed flutes

  & drums, if my shadow stops kissing me

  because of what I have witnessed,

  I shall holler to you through my bones,

  I promise you.

  THREE FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION

  —AFTER FRANCIS BACON

  Look how each pound of meat

  manages to climb up & weigh itself

  in the wobbly cage of the head.

  Did the painter ascend a dogwood

  or crawl into the hold of a slave ship

  to get a good view of the thing

  turning itself inside out beneath

  a century of interrogation lamps?

  It was always here, hiding behind

  gauze, myth, doubt, blood, & spit.

  After the exhibit on New Bond Street

  they walked blocks around a garden

  of April roses, tiger lilies, duckweed,

  & trillium, shaking their heads.


  The burning of mad silence left

  powder rooms & tea parlors smoky.

  Brushstrokes formed a blade to cut

  the hues. A slipped disk

  grew into a counterweight,

  & the muse kept saying,

  Learn to be kind to yourself.

  A twisted globe of flesh

  is held together by what

  it pushes against.

  A VISIT TO INNER SANCTUM

  A poet stands on the steps of the grand cathedral,

  wondering if he has been a coward in hard times.

  He traveled east, north, south, & seven directions

  of the west. When he first arrived on the other side

  of the sea, before he fell into the flung-open arms

  of a long romance, the lemon trees were in bloom.

  After a year, poised on the rift of a purple haze,

  he forgot all the questions he brought with him.

  Couldn’t he see the tear gas drifting over Ohio

  as flower children danced to Jefferson Airplane?

  Will he ever write a sonnet dedicated to the memory

  of four girls dynamited in a Birmingham church?

  Standing in the cathedral again, in the midst

  of what first calibrated his tongue—gold icons

  & hidden jaguars etched into the high beams—

  he remembers an emanation almost forgotten.

  He can’t stop counting dead heroes who lived in his head,

  sultry refrains that kept him alive in the country of clouds.

  Underneath the granite floor where he stands

  loom the stone buttresses of an ancient temple.

  When he was a boy, with his head bowed

  close to the scarred floor, he could hear voices

  rising from below, their old lingua franca

  binding with his. How could he forget?

  Outside the Institute of National Memory

  he toasts the gods hiding between stanzas.

  The girl he left behind for enemy soldiers

  to rough up & frighten, she never stopped

  waiting for him, even after she lost herself

  in booze. Now he faces a rusty iron gate.

  Did she know someday he’d question a life

  till he held only a bone at the dull-green door

  of an icehouse where they stole their first kiss?

  To have laughed beside another sweetheart

  in a distant land is to have betrayed the soil

  of dispossession hidden under his fingernails.

  Suppose he’d pursued other, smaller passions

  singing of night dew? The dead ones kept him