Poemunity — your poem community

For Craig The blackbird sings at the frontier of his music. The branch where he sat marks the brink of doubt, is the outpost of his realm, edge from which to rout encroachers with trills and melismatic runs sur- passing earthbound skills. It sounds like ardor, it sounds like joy. We are glad here at the border where he signs the air with his invisible staves, “Trespassers beware”— Song as survival— a kind of pure music which we cannot rival.

When life seems gray And short of fizz It seems that way Because it is.

I AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES There they are. Thirty at the corner. Black, raw, ready. Sores in the city that do not want to heal. II THE LEADERS Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop. They cancel, cure and curry. Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing the cold bonbon, the rhinestone thing. And hardly in a hurry. Hardly Belafonte, King, Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap. Bungled trophies. Their country is a Nation on no map. Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop in the passionate noon, in bewitching night are the detailed men, the copious men. They curry, cure, they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts are not divine, vivacious; the different tins are intense last entries; pagan argument; translations of the night. The Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse unfashionable damnations and descent; and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand, construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace. III GANG GIRLS A Rangerette Gang Girls are sweet exotics. Mary Ann uses the nutrients of her orient, but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove. (Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.) Mary is a rose in a whiskey glass. Mary’s Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils fret frankly, lilac hurries on. Summer is a hard irregular ridge. October looks away. And that’s the Year! Save for her bugle-love. Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion. Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger bringing an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag. “Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask: but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips and help him clutch you. Love’s another departure. Will there be any arrivals, confirmations? Will there be gleaning? Mary, the Shakedancer’s child from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at her laboring lover .... Mary! Mary Ann! Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps! for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leaning.

They didn't find it in me until months later— just like Vallejo who died on a rainy day far from the heat rising over a garden in silvers and reds—far away from the din of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn. The fever should have churned my blood into tight fists while the sunset stretched across the sky like an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat. I'd awake to winter in D.C., find streets covered in snow, the words of some ancient language blooming under my ankles like a song, a mantra called home. I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been. How to explain the hum of mosquitos in my ear, sensual and low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines, police sirens, a train's whistle. How easily I'd lost the taste for that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths.

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake. 1975–2010

It’s true: I almost never smile, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in love: my heart is that black violin played slowly. You know that moment late in the solo when the voice is so pure    you feel the blood in it: the wound between rage and complete surrender. That’s where I’m smiling. You just can’t see it—the sound bleeding perfectly inside me. The first time I killed a vampire    I was sad: I mean we were almost family. But that’s so many lives ago. I believe in the cry that cuts into the melody, the strings calling back the forgotten world. When I think of the madness that has made me    and the midnight I walk inside—all day long: when I think of that one note    that breaks what’s left of what’s human in me, man, I love    everything

let us go then let us go then I said and the band was I lone every which way way my spit slicked the sax’s brass chitlins. I said such wet would mud dust and soil red rock. I said doors to some room blown out the out blown in. let us go then let us go then. I said check the spit’s phlegm tenements. I said its slow typhoon syrup. it blooms the axe up and loams gypsum I said earths marblebaster. let us go then let us go then I said. preference of red or white I said my spit. where I was was where to be when I was there and what I made was it since it was where it was wasn’t it I said. but the body mustn’t be there I said. but the shapes are there I said here’s what we’ll do. let us go then let us go then wailing and whaling till one was off the chain I said fuck it. keeping time in a gorilla suit for the mud to come on uh i uh ii uh iii ...    uh cxvii and took it to the bridge to throw down wet wet wet I said. mold on that alabarble a salad a crop gainin on yuh in a gorilla suit I said. gaining on you I said I’ll take my time and yours and the bandstand gardened out let us go then let us go then and then we we we

If it please God, let less happen. Even out Earth's rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers and silence their calving, halving or doubling all geographical features toward the mean. Unlean against our hearts. Withdraw your grandeur from these parts.

When I came to my mother’s house the day after she had died it was already a museum of her unfinished gestures. The mysteries from the public library, due in two weeks. The half-eaten square of lasagna in the fridge. The half-burned wreckage of her last cigarette, and one red swallow of wine in a lipsticked glass beside her chair. Finally, a blue Bic on a couple of downs and acrosses left blank in the Sunday crossword, which actually had the audacity to look a little smug at having, for once, won.

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas containing stark white sheets, perfect in their presentation of absence. Only a bold logo on top revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else. I examined the sheets, peered through their grains — heavy cotton-laid striations — concealing text,in white ink, postmarked India. Even the watermark’s translucence made the script’s invisibility transparent. Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets of sophisticated pulp, paper containing scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned, untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate and circulate to keep alive its breathings. Corpuscles of a very different kind — hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.