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I remember the dusty floorboards of wood in the streetcar Of the Minneapolis Street Railway Company And the varnished yellow banquettes of tight-knit rattan Worn smooth by decades of passengers The worn gleaming brass grips at the corners of the seats And the motorman’s little bell Windows trembling in their casings as we crossed the avenue Liberty dimes falling softly into the steel-rimmed hour glass The gnarled hand of the motorman near. My grandmother arranged herself against the seat Her back as straight as a soldier’s beside me Her navy hat with velvet band And net veil down making her head seem distant, Her dreaming smile and the patient Roman nose, A repose so deep; from my place I watched her when we rode like princes Rattling past traffic stopped on the granite cobbles Riding downtown together, my hands in hers; All that so much That I love yet but feel no sadness for, that Time crossed out like the trolley tracks taken up Or entombed under the pliant blacktop of the modernized.

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times When I’m eating fried chicken When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken, When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country, The various blood debts you owe me, My past humiliations and my future crimes— Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken. But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything That’s not generally available to mankind. (Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.) And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots, And meat brings humiliation, And each gasp of air Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

How much shall I love her? For life, or not long? “Not long.” Alas! When forget her? In years, or by June? “By June.” And whom woo I after? No one, or a throng? “A throng.” Of these shall I wed one Long hence, or quite soon? “Quite soon.” And which will my bride be? The right or the wrong? “The wrong.” And my remedy – what kind? Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn? “Earth-hewn.”

Foreword to “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch” This poem is more properly a “dance poem” than a song or chant because the element of repetition is created by movements of language rather than duplicating words and sounds. However, it is in the spirit of ritual recitation that I wrote it/ a performance to drive away bad spirits perhaps. The story behind the poem is this: a man and woman who have been living together for some time separate. Part of the pain of separation involves possessions which they had shared. They both angrily believe they should have what they want. She asks for some possession and he denies her the right to it. She replies that she gave him money for a possession which he has and therefore should have what she wants now. He replies that she has forgotten that for the number of years they lived together he never charged her rent and if he had she would now owe him $7,000. She is appalled that he equates their history with a sum of money. She is even more furious to realize that this sum of money represents the entire rent on the apartment and implies that he should not have paid anything at all. She is furious. She kills him mentally. Once and for all she decides she is well rid of this man and that she shouldn’t feel sad at their parting. She decides to prove to herself that she’s glad he’s gone from her life. With joy she will dance on all the bad memories of their life together. for my motorcycle betrayer God damn it, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man; you’ve stepped on my shadow once too often, you’ve been unfaithful to me with other women, women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might ever be put in the same category with them; you’ve left me alone so often that I might as well have been a homesteader in Alaska these past years; and you’ve left me, thrown me out of your life often enough that I might as well be a newspaper, differently discarded each day. Now you’re gone for good and I don’t know why but your leaving actually made me as miserable as an earthworm with no earth, but now I’ve crawled out of the ground where you stomped me and I gradually stand taller and taller each day. I have learned to sing new songs, and as I sing, I’m going to dance on your grave because you are dead dead dead under the earth with the rest of the shit, I’m going to plant deadly nightshade on your grassy mound and make sure a hemlock tree starts growing there. Henbane is too good for you, but I’ll let a bit grow there for good measure because we want to dance, we want to sing, we want to throw this old man to the wolves, but they are too beautiful for him, singing in harmony with each other. So some white wolves and I will sing on your grave, old man and dance for the joy of your death. “Is this an angry statement?” “No, it is a statement of joy.” “Will the sun shine again?” "Yes, yes, yes,” because I’m going to dance dance dance Duncan’s measure, and Pindar’s tune, Lorca’s cadence, and Creeley’s hum, Stevens’ sirens and Williams’ little Morris dance, oh, the poets will call the tune, and I will dance, dance, dance on your grave, grave, grave, because you’re a sonofabitch, a sonofabitch, and you tried to do me in, but you cant cant cant. You were a liar in a way that only I know: You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen. You were mean to me, and I’ve survived, God damn you, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man, I’m going to learn every traditional dance, every measure, and dance dance dance on your grave one step for every time you done me wrong.

Who was the woman who lived in the kingdom behind the barrier. There are those who will tell you she was the wife of every man in the village. And one night while her husbands were finishing their day at the gasworks, the woman was boiling oats for her only child, a young girl who’d amassed a beautiful collection of spoons in her life, each one given to her by one of her mother’s husbands. And this same night the young daughter died. And the woman buried the daughter with her spoons in her pockets. Come daybreak the hostiles appeared at the barrier with ice in their beards. “To hell with Pax Americana,” they said. And they camped outside the wall that night chanting war cries. You say you want to know the names of the war cries that survived history. “Wheel the gun carriages up to the barrier of the empire of husbands.” “Our first word is ruin and our next word is value.” There are those who will tell you the hostiles carried on like this for some weeks. Until one night the dead daughter led them behind the barrier, through a tunnel she’d dug in the earth with her spoons. It was thus the hostiles made it their business to burn everything. They burned the village crops and the distillery. They burned the apothecary, the potash mine. Black soot fell on the livery and they burned the livery too. And there’s another war cry that’s since survived history: “Tonight like god’s scalp in your kingdom behind the barrier our burning makes snow and ends nowhere.” You say, where were the village husbands while all of this was 
happening. There are those who will tell you they were working their jobs at the gasworks, and when they heard the bullhorn roar in the watchtower they were smoking cigarillos and pacing the floor of the gasworks. And the roar of the bullhorn had a strange effect on the husbands, who each began daydreaming of his wife at home in the village. The first husband thought: “The taste of the breath of my wife, it’s like saying the word houndstooth to myself in the dark.” The next husband thought of her letting her hair down in front of a vanity, and smearing her blue eye shadow onto her fingers, and plucking the stray hairs and flyaways off her head. The next husband thought of her saying, “I’m correcting god’s blunders,” when he asked her why she wears all this foundation on her face. Another husband thought: “Quitting time is worthless to me so long as the work I do in the gasworks makes me think of my wife’s jawbone.” And all together the husbands said: “The jawbones of my wife, they beat both the same, like when I watch a train leave the 
kingdom, and all I can see is the pistons beating away in the smoke.” And when the hostiles entered the gasworks the husbands were dancing. And you say you want to know the words the hostiles spoke when they entered. There are those who will tell you they said this: “Don’t quit dancing.” “There’s a penalty for an empire that believes it can survive itself,” they said. And so they pointed their war clubs at the husbands, and they said don’t quit, don’t quit dancing on the floor of the gasworks, and they bludgeoned to death the husbands who refused to keep dancing, and one by one the husbands fell dead on the floor of the gasworks, each one dancing himself to death at the hands of the hostiles. And this dancing took many deaths. But you say where was the wife who lost all her husbands this day. There are those who will tell you she was hiding the last of the cheese in a boot. She was rolling up the deed to her house in the village. She was picking up her daughter’s violin and stuffing the scroll in the violin’s f-hole. She was fleeing for the wall when she was stopped by the hostiles. Dance, said the hostiles, and they pointed their war clubs at her skull. And these war clubs had a strange effect on the wife, who began daydreaming about a man who wasn’t her husband. She thought of cutting his hair in a sunflower patch in the village. The time should be dusk, she thought, and the shears, they should flash once in her hands like a scythe. She thought there should be two swarms of no-see-ums, one smoldering around each of her hands. And she’d tilt back the head of the man who wasn’t her husband. And she’d oil his throat with the badger brush in her hand. And he’d smell the sandalwood lather she worked in the bristles. And he’d smell the eau de cologne on her neck when she leaned in close. And she’d shave his throat with the blade of a balisong. And the woman thought each time he moaned when she stroked him a dragonfly should dance from his mouth. And he’ll moan until the dragonfly quits dancing, she thought. And I’ll dance around his throat all night like a lantern. “Because a war club doesn’t taste like a war club,” she said. “It tastes like my husbands all breathing at once.” She spoke these words with a hole in her skull in the snow. And the smoke coming out of the hole was her thoughts. And her body lying there in the village square was so beautiful the hostiles began to dance on either side of the body. And they danced, and they danced, until they too fell dead in the snow beside her.

I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced Nigra] into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. —Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Senator and Presidential Candidate for the States’ Rights Party, 1948 I said, “I’m gonna fight Thurmond from the mountain to the sea.” —Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Civil Rights Matriarch, South Carolina, 1948 The youngest has been married off. He is as tall as Abraham Lincoln. Here, on his wedding day, he flaunts the high spinning laugh of a newly freed slave. I stand above him, just off the second-floor landing, watching the celebration unfold. Uncle-cousins, bosom buddies, convertible cars of nosy paramours, strolling churlish penny- pinchers pour onto the mansion estate. Below, Strom Thurmond is dancing with my mother. The favorite son of South Carolina has already danced with the giddy bride and the giddy bride’s mother. More women await: Easter dressy, drenched in caramel, double exposed, triple cinched, lined up, leggy, ready. I refuse to leave the porch. If I walk down I imagine he will extend his hand, assume I am next in his happy darky line, #427 on his dance card. His history and mine, burnt cork and blackboard chalk, concentric, pancaked, one face, two histories, slow dragging, doing the nasty. My father knows all this. Daddy’s Black Chief Justice legs straddle the boilerplate carapace of the CSS H. L. Hunley, lost Confederate submarine, soon to be found just off the coast of Charleston. He keeps it fully submerged by applying the weight of every treatise he has ever written against the death penalty of South Carolina. Chanting “Briggs v. Elliott,” he keeps the ironside door of the submarine shut. No hands. His eyes are a Black father’s beacon, search- lights blazing for the married-off sons, and on the unmarried, whale-eyed nose-in-book daughter, born unmoored, quiet, yellow, strategically placed under hospital lights to fully bake. The one with the most to lose. There will be no trouble. Still, he chain- smokes. A burning stick of mint & Indian leaf seesaws between his lips. He wants me to remember that trouble is a fire that runs like a staircase up then down. Even on a beautiful day in June. I remember the new research just out: What the Negro gave America Chapter 9,206: Enslaved Africans gifted porches to North America. Once off the boats they were told, then made, to build themselves a place—to live. They build the house that will keep them alive. Rather than be the bloody human floret on yet another southern tree, they imagine higher ground. They build landings with floor enough to see the trouble coming. Their arced imaginations nail the necessary out into the floral air. On the backs and fronts of twentypenny houses, a watching place is made for the ones who will come tipping with torch & hog tie through the quiet woods, hoping to hang them as decoration in the porcupine hair of longleaf. The architecture of Black people is sui generis. This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved: Their design will be stolen. Their wits will outlast gold. My eyes seek historical rest from the kiss- kiss theater below; Strom Thurmond’s it’s-never-too-late-to-forgive-me chivaree. I search the tops of yellow pine while my fingers reach, catch, pinch my father’s determined-to-rise smoke. Long before AC African people did the math: how to cool down the hot air of South Carolina? If I could descend, without being trotted out by some roughrider driven by his submarine dreams, this is what I’d take my time and scribble into the three-tiered, white créme wedding cake: Filibuster. States’ Rights. The Grand Inquisition of the great Thurgood Marshall. This wedding reception would not have been possible without the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (opposed by you-know-who). The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his sandy seersucker fedora to the vows. The top of Strom Thurmond’s bald head reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto pose:Segregation Forever. All my life he has been the face of hatred; the blue eyes of the Confederate flag, the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly heads up into the dark skirts of trees, the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of German shepherds, still clenched inside the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader legs of Black schoolteachers, the single- minded pupae growing between the legs of white boys crossing the tracks, ready to force Black girls into fifth-grade positions, Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101. I didn’t want to dance with him. My young cousin arrives at my elbow. Her beautiful lips the color of soft-skin mangoes. She pulls, teasing the stitches of my satin bridesmaid gown, “You better go on down there and dance with Strom— while he still has something left.” I don’t tell her it is unsouthern for her to call him by his first name, as if they are familiar. I don’t tell her: To bear witness to marriage is to believe that everything moving through the sweet wedding air can be confidently,left— to Love. I stand on the landing high above the beginnings of Love, holding a plastic champagne flute, drinking in the warm June air of South Carolina. I hear my youngest brother’s top hat joy. Looking down I find him, deep in the giddy crowd, modern, integrated, interpretive. For ten seconds I consider dancing with Strom. His Confederate hands touch every shoulder, finger, back that I love. I listen to the sound of Black laughter shimmying. All worry floats beyond the gurgling submarine bubbles, the white railing, every drop of champagne air. I close my eyes and Uncle Freddie appears out of a baby’s breath of fog. (The dead are never porch bound.) He moves with ease where I cannot. He walks out on the rice-thrown air, heaving a lightning bolt instead of a wave. Suddenly, there is a table set, complete with 1963 dining room stars, they twinkle twinkle up & behind him. Thelonious, Martin, Malcolm, Nina, Dakota, all mouths Negro wide & open have come to sing me down. His tattered almanac sleeps curled like a wintering slug in his back pocket. His dark Dogon eyes jet to the scene below, then zoom past me until they are lost in the waning sugilite sky. Turning in the shadows of the wheat fields, he whispers a truth plucked from the foreword tucked in his back pocket: Veritas: Black people will forgive you quicker than you can say Orangeburg Massacre. History does not keep books on the handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved who built this Big House, long before I arrived for this big wedding, knew the power of a porch. This native necessity of nailing down a place, for the cooling off of air, in order to lift the friendly, the kindly, the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant, into the arms of the grand peculiar, for the greater good of the public spectacular: us giving us away.

a perfect symmetry of both parts animal, feline and quizzical, and man, made (undone) sworn in stormed again electric, transmitted from the foreground into appropriate weather the skin being elastic cause for several considerations contrite ((argued over) aren't we of beautiful tangents beautiful ox blood, black sand morning from small wire filigree, a gesture

Then came the darker sooner, came the later lower. We were no longer a sweeter-here happily-ever-after. We were after ever. We were farther and further. More was the word we used for harder. Lost was our standard-bearer. Our gods were fallen faster, and fallen larger. The day was duller, duller was disaster. Our charge was error. Instead of leader we had louder, instead of lover, never. And over this river broke the winter’s black weather.