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Nobody I know is a god. A mother and son fall into the river's million hands, the river's smash and grab. They go under, climb the ropeless water up, wave, open their mouths and scream wet silences as they slide back under. A man jumps in to save them, leaves the edge as a needle into the river's muddy sinews, a woman jumps in to save his vanishing and the mother and son and is stripped by the flood, her pants drowning right beside her, another man jumps in to save them all and a woman jumps in after him to save them all plus one, cars arrive and people get out and leap into the river, the river's being filled with whatever's in their pockets and their hands and their eyes, with nickels and dollar bills and bibles and sunsets, the beautiful brush strokes of this beautifully dying day, people pile like a river inside the river, they keep coming and diving in, they keep feeding their breath to the water, which is less, which is thinned, until the mother and son rise on a mound of strangers and dead, the sun warming them, blessing their faces slowly dry.

One way to draw France is in scallops: Dunkirk to Brest, Brest to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, The imperceptible stone sag of certain dolmens over the Pyrenees between Saint-Jean & Banyuls-sur-Mer Then, to Nice Nice, skirting the Alps to Lauterbourg From Lauterbourg back to where you began For the meticulous, the additions of Cherbourg, Toulon, & even Le Havre, Maybe Givet Yours is a green diorama It contains several kilowatts of sun, a superabundance of flowers Men dress like they are perpetually on their way to a funeral White people, their splotch-parchment cheeks All those roast chickens, none with the fat trimmed from the rump

For we are thy people, and thou art our God; We are thy children and thou our father. We are thy servants, and thou art our master; We are thy congregation and thou our portion. We are thine inheritance, thou our lot; We are thy flock, thou our shepherd. We are thy vineyard, and thou art our keeper; We are thy work, and thou our creator. We are thy faithful one: thou art our beloved; We are thy chosen: thou art the Lord our God. We are thy subjects, thou our King; We are thine acknowledged people, thou our acknowledged Lord.

The house felt like the opera, the audience in their seats, hushed, ready, but the cast not yet arrived. And if I said anything to try to appease the anxious air, my words would hang alone like the single chandelier waiting to dim the auditorium, but still too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light announcing only itself, bringing more emptiness into the emptiness.

There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they've been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There's a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh, is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest— And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow, fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier? This is rhetorical. Like, "What to the Negro is the fourth of July?" A flag should be stitched with a fuse. Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland. I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not what you might guess), little sails and banners down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast. My wife's people are from San Salvador. They sent us with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment. Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke. Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power- washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed's trunks, the apocalyptic Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates's Flag from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no, like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny, texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost. Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts or strips of jerky. How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean, what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite? Gates's salute is a torch song, a rhythm of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme. I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire shut up in our bones.

in ten Minutes Come back: you will have taught me chiNese (sAtie). shall I retUrn the favor? Give you otHer lessons (Ting!)? Or would you prefer sileNce?

For years my heart inquired of me Where Jamshid's sacred cup might be, And what was in its own possession It asked from strangers, constantly; Begging the pearl that's slipped its shell From lost souls wandering by the sea. Last night I took my troubles to The Magian sage whose keen eyes see A hundred answers in the wine Whose cup he, laughing, showed to me. I questioned him, "When was this cup That shows the world's reality Handed to you?" He said, "The day Heaven's vault of lapis lazuli Was raised, and marvelous things took place By Intellect's divine decree, And Moses' miracles were made And Sameri's apostasy." He added then, "That friend they hanged High on the looming gallows tree— His sin was that he spoke of things Which should be pondered secretly, The page of truth his heart enclosed Was annotated publicly. But if the Holy Ghost once more Should lend his aid to us we'd see Others perform what Jesus did— Since in his heartsick anguish he Was unaware that God was there And called His name out ceaselessly." I asked him next, "And beauties' curls That tumble down so sinuously, What is their meaning? Whence do they come?" "Hafez," the sage replied to me, "It's your distracted, lovelorn heart That asks these questions constantly."

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers, green roses, chrysanthemums, lilies: retrophilia, philocaly, philomath, sarcophilous—all this love, of the past, of beauty, of knowledge, of flesh; this is catalogue & counter: philalethist, negrophile, neophile. A negro man walks down the street, taps Newport out against a brick wall & stares at you. Love that: lygophilia, lithophilous. Be amongst stones, amongst darkness. We are glass house. Philopornist, philotechnical. Why not worship the demimonde? Love that—a corner room, whatever is not there, all the clutter you keep secret. Palaeophile, ornithophilous: you, antiquarian, pollinated by birds. All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love; petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt; for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words for love (for you), all these ways to say believe in symphily, to say let us live near each other.

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades. I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades. For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme! For you, for you I am trilling these songs.