American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
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AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Glad someone shot deserved to be shot finally,
George Wallace. After you send your basket of balms
And berries for the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,
After you add your palms to the psalms & palm covered
Caskets of the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,
I’ll muster a pinch of prayer for you. You are the blind
Protagonist of a story that begins, “In my previous life
My work involved returning runaway slaves to slavery,”
And ends with the image of a black nurse pushing
Your old ass in a wheelchair. Can you guess what black
Folk passing empty cotton fields feel, George Wallace?
I damn you with the opposite of that feeling. I keep thinking
I’m confessing for the first time, the reason I fear you,
And you keep asking why I’m telling this old story again.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
You have a gun but to use the bullet
You decide your wife, having snuggled it
Under her tongue, should then smuggle it
Into your pie hole but she swallows it.
You have a gun but to use the poison
You have your son dip a rose in venom
So strong the smell alone will kill someone,
But the first to die smelling it is your son.
You have a gun but to use the dagger
You decide your daughter should dangle
It beneath her dress. She refuses to endanger
Her self-respect. You need to find goons,
Wranglers, wire, gin, ingenuity, cotton gins,
You need the constitution. You have a gun.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
When I am nowhere near a ledge or knife covered
In a corridor of fever colored carpet or catching rain
Bead upon the morning headlights hungering some crash
To crack & blacken me before a train full of women
With nose rings & thigh boots, the curved ass of a mother
With her toddler & the rain still following the hills
And shoulders of parts of Maryland & New Jersey,
And the oncoming trains passing inches from head-on
Headlong into Newark where I almost escaped this path,
Before remembering the thrill coloring even today’s
Melancholy delay asleep, awake, the wild haired woman
Smiling on the stairs before fading, a song in the ear
Like the broken phone booth I passed in the Village
Beside a puddle of what could have been crushed tomatoes
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
I cut myself on some glass in the water.
I was out driving around the stars.
I was chopping wood out back.
I was at the abattoir grabbing a snack.
I was grabbing my phone in the truck.
I was smoking below the boat deck.
I was practicing electric guitar.
I was listening to aspiring laughter.
I was on the toilet with a magazine.
I was home awaiting a limousine.
I was bargaining with the mortician.
I was laying a great foundation.
I was practicing trumpet while drowning.
I was grinding my hooves to nails.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
When MLK was shot his blood changed to change
Wherever it hit the floor. Like the others,
Jackson & Abernathy gathered a few of the coins
For themselves. A few sank into the pockets
Of the detectives & forensic scientists, reporters.
A maid sold the penny she found for a pretty penny
On the black market. It is in a display case beside
The bullets Du Bois kept in the gun under his bed.
Bird got so high on horn, he disappeared. X grew
Large as a three hundred year old tree colonizing
The landscape. In the game of “chicken” two drivers
Speed towards each other & if the one who is chicken
Does not swerve, both drivers may die in the crash.
This country is mine as much as an orphan’s house is his.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Later the white boy we once beat like a drum
Died after crashing his Camaro around a bend
Off Shop Road. He was an asshole. Ask the baby
Black boys he bullied at Robert E. Lee Middle School
Where the Robert E. Lee statue was painted white
So often over the years it looked like someone
Covered in a sheet of glue. I would not have liked
To attend a middle school named after Emmett Till
Or for that matter, any murdered black person.
When I was the age of Emmett Till, I reckoned
MLK was an old man at the age he was killed.
I am old enough now to know the drum, though beaten,
Is not an instrument of violence. Nor is a banjo
Or whistle. I’m sorry I missed the white boy’s funeral.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
It was discovered the best way to combat
Sadness was to make your sadness a door.
Or make it an envelope of wireless chatter
Or wires pulled from the radio tape recorder
Your mother bought you for Christmas in 1984.
If you think a hammer is the only way to hammer
A nail, you ain’t thought of the nail correctly.
My problem was I’d decided to make myself
A poem. It made me sweat in private selfishly.
It made me bleed, bleep & weep for health.
As a poem I could show my children the man
I dreamed I was, my mother & fathers, my half
Brothers, the lovers I lost. Just morning, as a poem,
I asked myself if I was going to weep today.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
But there never was a black male hysteria:
As if being called Nigger never makes you
Disappear. As if the fear of other people
Never makes you levitate. As if the nuzzle
Of a bullet can’t poke a hole in your breath.
As if you cannot drink from the river
When into the river you disappear & water
Floods the hole in your breath. You make shit,
You piss, you calculate mistakes, you can turn
Stone into metal, you are able to breathe wind. Air
Touches your skin like medicine & you disappear.
It’s crazy. It’s as if you are not being hunted
By hysteria. It’s as if your death is never death.
You appear, you appear to disappear, you disappear.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
In a parallel world where all Dr. Who’s
Are black, I’m the doctor who knows no god
Is more powerful than Time. In a parallel world
Where all the doctors who are black see cops
Box black boys in cop cars & caskets, I’m
The doctor who blacks out whenever he sees
A police box. In a parallel world where doctors
Who box cops in caskets cry doing their jobs,
I disappear inside a skull that’s larger on the inside.
Question: if, in a
parallel world where every Dr.
Who was black, you were the complex Time Lord,
When & where would you explore? My answer is,
A brother has to know how to time travel & doctor
Himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Over-aged, over grave, overlooked brother
Seeks adjoining variable female structure
Covered in chocolate, cinnamon, molasses,
Freckled, sandy or sunset colored flesh
Expressively motored by a blend of intellectual
Fat & muscle while several complex & simple
Emotional frequencies pulse along her veins.
Must be a careful & moderately self-indulgent
Cinematographer, modestly self-conscious, reasonably
Self-important, spiritually self-educated, marginally
Self-destructive. Must be willing to raise orchids
Or kids in a land of assassins; willing to wield a fluid
Expression in the war her lover wages against himself,
And a silver tongue in the war we wage against death.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
I only intend to send word to my future
Self perpetuation is a war against Time
Travel is essentially the aim of any religion
Is blindness the color one sees under water
Breath can be overshadowed in darkness
The benefits of blackness can seem radical
Black people in America are rarely compulsive
Hi-fivers believe joy is a matter of touching others
Is forbidden the only word God doesn’t know
You have to heal yourself to truly be heroic
You have to think once a day of killing your self
Awareness requires a touch of blindness & self
Importance is the only word God knows
To be free is to live because only the dead are slaves
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
In the saddest part of the story the brother says
To the muse of his heartache, Don’t you ever
Come near my grave. The saddest scene is where
The daughter’s ghost says to the mother, Don’t
Come near my grave. The frail speckled shell says
To the shy yolk it meant to protect, but only held
Captive, Don’t you ever come near my grave.
The saddest part of the opera is where Frida says it
To Diego. The saddest moment is where the gifted
Says it to the gift giver & the moment where
The present says it to yesterday: you have to love me
Better. The moment where the prisoner says it
To the future & the pastor. The saddest part is where
The dirt says it to the seeds in the flowers above the grave.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
I remember my sister’s last hoorah.
She joined all the black people I’m tired of losing,
All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson,
Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago,
Baltimore, wherever the names alive are
Like the names in graves. I am someone
With a good memory & better imagination.
Can we really be friends if we don’t believe
In the same things, Assassin? Probably,
Ghosts are allergic to us. Because we are dust,
Don’t you & I share a loss, don’t we belong
Together, Brother, Sweetness, Sweetness,
Sweetness? Poor, ragged Heart, blind, savage
Heart, I’ve almost grown tired of talking to you.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
When I am close enough, I am reminded
Of the mythic orchid called Lorca’s Breath.
Named by Salvador Dalí a decade after the poet
Was killed, the flower is said to sprout petals
The shade of a swollen moon but once or twice
Before it dies. Also lost was the painting
Dalí painted of Lorca’s writing hand: a long
Almost animal shadow crawling over land shaped
Like a man with the body of a woman. A cuff
Of celestial texture. A button of ruby. The orchid’s
Mouth is the shade of pussy, its leaves hang
As if listening to a lover whisper with her back
To you. Rumor that this flower first appeared
Near wherever Lorca is buried, I know to be untrue.
Sonnet Index
* * *
The black poet would love to say his century began
Inside me is a black-eyed animal
But there never was a black male hysteria
Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk
Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous
Are you not the color of this country’s current threat
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison
I pour a pinch of serious poison for you
You don’t seem to want it, but you wanted it
Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye LaVette
Even the most kindhearted white woman
Seven of the ten things I love in the face
The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated
I’m not sure how to hold my face when I dance
* * *
We suppose Ms. Dickinson is like the abandoned
Probably, ghosts are allergic to us. Our uproarious
Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of sword
For her last birthday I found in a used New Jersey
A brother versed in ideological & material swagger
But there never was a black male hysteria
Our sermon today concerns the dialectic
Something in the metaphor of the bow
An old woman looks at the rows of clothes
Maybe I was too hard on Derek Walcott
On some level, I’m always full of Girl Scout cookies
America, you just wanted change is all, a return
You know how when the light you splatter spreads
If you have never felt what is fluid
* * *
Rilke ends his sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo” saying
Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader
Probably all our encounters are existential
I’m full of more water than a forest
But there never was a black male hysteria
Because he cannot distinguish a blackbird
Sometimes the father almost sees looking
It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga
The subject is allowed up to twenty years
The song must be cultural, confessional, clear
A remix of “Pony” by Ginuwine plays
The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk
Drive like fifteen miles along a national parkway
After you turn off Shop Road where the flag leans
* * *
This one goes out to DeMascas Jackson
Because a law was passed that said there was no worth
But there never was a black male hysteria
Any day now you will have the ability to feed the name
This word can be the difference between knowing
Why someone would crowd into a church is beyond me
From now on I will do my laundry early Sunday
Otherwise home is the mess laid bare
>
I thought we might as well sing the fables of sea
I’d played silence but later realized my word
Suppose you could speak nothing but money
One of the most amazing things about me is
My mother says I am beautiful inside
A brother versed in spiritual calisthenics
* * *
Glad someone shot deserved to be shot finally
You have a gun but to use the bullet
When I am nowhere near a ledge or knife covered
I cut myself on some glass in the water
When MLK was shot his blood changed to change
Later the white boy we once beat like a drum
It was discovered the best way to combat
But there never was a black male hysteria
In a parallel world where all Dr. Who’s
Over-aged, over grave, overlooked brother
I only intend to send word to my future
In the saddest part of the story the brother says
I remember my sister’s last hoorah
When I am close enough, I am reminded
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude for the support of the following journals: The American Poetry Review, Baffler, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review (Ink Lit), Kenyon Review, Literary Hub (http://lithub.com/tag/poems/), New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day (April 25, 2017, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/american-sonnet-my-past-and-future-assassin), Poetry, A Poetry Congeries, and Tin House.
My gratitude for the support of the following institutions: the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
I can’t begin to account for all the love and friendship that made these poems possible. I made you a book of poems. A special career-enabling thank-you to Paul Slovak.
Many years ago the poet Anthony Butts told me he was writing a book called Male Hysteria. I loved the title and its many possibilities. Alas, the book never came to be. Maybe I’m not even remembering the title correctly. Still think of you, Brother.