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Then, take this tambourine inside the sheep barn, listen to the anaconda's intestines, the shark's walking stick, learn the river insect's secret neon calligraphy, swim through Frida Khalo's hair and come out smelling like orchids, lift your appetite towards the certified blue turtle, feast on Garcia Lorca's leather shoes and taste the sun, the worms of Andalusia, don't hesitate in front of a donut, a ferris wheel, the crab nebula, excavate diamond-eyed demons, Chaucer's liver, Minoan helmets, paste Anne Sexton's face on a $1,000 bill and purchase a dozen metaphors, beware of the absolute scorpion, the iguana with the limping leg, permit indwelling, white words around the eyes, the confrontation of windows, never feed your towel to the alligator, he will eat you and eat you and eat you.

Aunt. Don’t ask me how I come to address my mother thus. Long complex, complicated stories: heart-warmingly familial and sadly colonial. You know how utterly, wonderfully insensitive the young can be? Oh no. We are not here talking adults who should know better but never do. Aunt, I thank you for being alive today, alert, crisp. Since we don’t know tomorrow, see me touching wood, clutching at timbers, hugging forests: So I can enter young, age, infirmities defied. Hear my offspring chirping: “Mummy, touch plastic, it lasts longer!” O, she knows her mama well. The queen of plastics a tropical Bedouin, she must travel light. Check out the wood, feel its weight, its warmth check out the beauty of its lines, and perfumed shavings. Back to you, My Dear Mother, I can hear the hailing chorus at the drop of your name. And don’t I love to drop it here, there, and everywhere? Not missing out by time of day, not only when some chance provides, but pulled and dragged into talks private and public. Listen to the “is-your-mother-still-alive” greeting, eyes popping out, mouth agape and trembling: That here, in narrow spaces and not-much-time, who was I to live? Then she who bore me? Me da ase. Ye de ase.

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding; For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company; For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood; For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching; For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something—something all our own; For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh; For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer; For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations; Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.

i was left out i was chosen second & then left out i was left handed  i was left to fend for myself   i was the second in command  the second in line   i came without direction * i want the milk  i want my first pick  i want choice   & all its implications  there was a * residue of scar between us  it chafed when we rubbed our chests together * hello, brother, hello? hello in there, brother, can you hear me?  it's a long tunnel to the grave    speak you were my first god  i was rapt in your coming (mother better eat her vegetables, she better chew) choo choo what's bitter between us * i want the milk  i need it for my teeth  they're soft  the gums bleed  there's the evidence on my toothbrush  i got the second draft  i need calcium to make up  i got a job & left i don't know where you're buried * what do you need?  what will make you happy?  what do you want?  the dead do have mouths & appetites  suck it up   there's plenty in the ice box   more where that came from * if somebody asked me what's next  i wouldn't know  i took my hands off her like something hot  or fragile   or in pain  i was aghast  at suffering how you can feed & feed it & it's never full * there's a separation between us  a suppuration  there's just the space of an idea  i don't know what's missing  it's a blind spot  sometimes my left eye focuses & it's like looking at both of us through a window * i'm telling you the facts of life for you haven't been told you're in your late fifties  you're dis- eased or disinterested  a queer unable to come out of the casket  OK * you live this life  i'll live the next  she only has enough milk for one baby  i'll go around this time  you come the next  that time you'll have a better mother i promise you that

How were we to know, leaving your two kids behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap hotels in New York City to draw customers like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby? Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door with a cut on one side the exact shape of the toilet bowl that was in its way when I closed it. I opened and shut the door, admiring the fit and despairing of it. You discovered the initials of lovers carved on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart. How wrong the place was to us then, unable to see the portents of our future that seem so clear now in the naiveté of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s disdain for those with little money, the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay our love down, and in this way began our unwise and persistent and lucky life together.

You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt. But at first when you were learning, I feared for my neck, saw my ears like sliced fruit on the newspapered floor. Taking us back in time, you cleverly clipped my head in a flat-top. The years in between were styles no one had ever seen, or should see again: when the wind rose half my hair floated off in feathers, the other half bristling, brief as a brush. In the chair, almost asleep, I hear the bright scissors dancing. Hear you hum, full-breasted as Aida, carefully trimming the white from my temples, so no one, not even I, will know.

I dreamt last night the fright was over, that the dust came, and then water, and women and men, together again, and all was quiet in the dim moon’s light. A paean of such patience— laughing, laughing at me, and the days extend over the earth’s great cover, grass, trees, and flower- ing season, for no clear reason.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Did your father come home after fighting through the week at work? Did the sweat change to salt in his ears? Was that bitter white grain the only music he’d hear? Is this why you were quiet when other poets sang of the black man’s beauty? Is this why you choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty? Were there as many offices for pain as love? Should a black man never be shy? Was your father a mountain twenty shovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train leaving a lone column of smoke? Was he a black magnolia singing at your feet? Was he a blackjack smashed against your throat?

You must not wonder, though you think it strange, To see me hold my louring head so low, And that mine eyes take no delight to range About the gleams which on your face do grow. The mouse which once hath broken out of trap Is seldom ’ticèd with the trustless bait, But lies aloof for fear of more mishap, And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit. The scorchèd fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame, Will hardly come to play again with fire, Whereby I learn that grievous is the game Which follows fancy dazzled by desire: So that I wink or else hold down my head, Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred.