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when i look at my life i feel like bursting into tears marriage and mental illness vintage washed michael jackson graphic spiritual disco grieving ritual sell your body to your horse-eyed past little fictions somebody got to sing and somebody got to play the squaw last time i saw him last time i saw my honey buried your dead lack of afro exit wounds cut off whole limbs of generational desire the death of cleopatra hell or high water get some fucking love in your life girl ghost chant you’ve got to die if you want to live amidst and against the things we are rubbed into the cloth wrapped around their faces now white men are black men too the ways we can’t say no i call you queen not as a term of endearment but as a reminder our histories meet on the inside we all be black moses slave for the river same river twice sometimes have to emphasize the brown part hey there beautiful brown girl we don't usually change until things are so painful that we must

Air as lost time Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus Smack-thin, it lingers forty years I thought it came from the jeweled world we’d seen Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive But it was just pleasure, blank and sure Now what is there to sing From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves Earphones drive it through your head

In the American schoolyard where we lunged headfirst onto the rocky ground scrab- bling for a ball as if for love, the crossed chalk- line still electrified our tough boyish hearts, and no one much cared for such exotic gods as loomed up out of the Palatine Hills in the required guidebooks dumped in heaps behind our makeshift goal. We knew what we knew. Sweatstains darkened our blue school shirts while our fathers’ fighters strafed the mock- ups in the practice fields, never far enough from town it didn’t thunder all day through the blackened cottages’ stony stares locked up tight behind their shot bolts; nor through the evening, either, when drifting home, stripped to the waist, we’d dance feet-chalked across the marketplace like young, uneasy gods, a little drunk on our shame, our power.

Grand Cayman This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness, Inverted octopus with heavenward arms Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove⎯ A bird almost⎯of almost bird alarms, Is pulmonary to the wind that jars Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch. The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly, Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch. The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk; But this,⎯defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood, Almost no shadow⎯but the air’s thin talk. Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue! While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main By what conjunctions do the winds appoint Its apotheosis, at last⎯the hurricane!

Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood, soft coal they called it from the mountains of western Pennsylvania where my father grew up and fled as soon as he could, where my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark. The furnace it fed stood in the dank basement, its many arms upraised like Godzilla or some other monster. It was my job to pull out clinkers and carry them to the alley bin. Mornings were chilly, frost on windows etching magic landscapes.  I liked to stand over the hot air registers the warmth blowing up my skirts. But the basement scared me at night. The fire glowed like a red eye through the furnace door and the clinkers fell loud and the shadows came at me as mice scampered.  The washing machine was tame but the furnace was always hungry.

They’d barely emerged from the deep-green forests of that epauletted century. Geraniums bloomed on windowsills in Heidelberg. Student princes eyed the tavern keeper’s daughter through the blond foam of their tankards. The future must have seemed weightless as it came nosing through the clouds, smooth as a biblical fish throwing its giant shadow on the sea floor, its thin gold-beater’s skin pressed back against its ribs, cloche-hatted women in fox furs waving through its observation windows. Composed of too much dream stuff to be echt matériel, shoals of them congregated silently over London in the moon’s dark phases, concealed above clouds. Their crews were unnerved by crackling blue halos; eerie lightning shot from frostbitten fingers as they lowered spy baskets on trapeze wires below the cloud cover, taking careful soundings, then dropped their antique payloads on the gaping population. Those whom they did not kill scarcely believed in them, improbable contraptions the parchment-yellow color of old maps, vessels a rational traveler might have chosen, a half-century earlier, to pursue daft, round-the-world steampunk wagers. But for them — the gilded aerialists in their giant dirigibles — the world remained a storybook unfolding endlessly in signs and wonders, over which they drifted in stylish accidie; leviathan hunters, relaxed as Victorian naturalists. And up there everything looked different: the borders absurd, the people in their witch-fearing villages as 
out-of-date as peasants in a medieval breviary. The mountains, too, seemed surpassable, offering an alternative angle on the sublime. Occasionally there was concern: a tear in the fabric, hooked to a typhoon’s tail above the China Sea, or harried by storms across the Atlantic. But how lighter than air they were. They did not understand, as they fell continually upwards, how the nature of the element was the price of their rising: the assiduous atom seeking an exit, thronging the fabric of their cells. Witness was the privilege of the many: newsreels captured the death of a star and — oh the humanity! — its last leisurely plummet in fire, its ashen armature.

After reading Dr Rieu’s translation of St Mark’s Gospel. Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East? This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ. Airy, in an airy manner in an airy parkland walking, Others take him by the hand, lead him, do the talking. But the Form, the airy One, frowns an airy frown, What they say he knows must be, but he looks aloofly down, Looks aloofly at his feet, looks aloofly at his hands, Knows they must, as prophets say, nailèd be to wooden bands. As he knows the words he sings, that he sings so happily Must be changed to working laws, yet sings he ceaselessly. Those who truly hear the voice, the words, the happy song, Never shall need working laws to keep from doing wrong. Deaf men will pretend sometimes they hear the song, the words, And make excuse to sin extremely; this will be absurd. Heed it not. Whatever foolish men may do the song is cried For those who hear, and the sweet singer does not care that he was crucified. For he does not wish that men should love him more than anything Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing.

The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armor against fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings. Scepter and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field And plant fresh laurels where they kill, But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still. Early or late They stoop to fate And must give up their murmuring breath, When they, pale captives, creep to death. The garlands wither on your brow, Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon death’s purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds. Your heads must come To the cold tomb; Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

On one occasion Yūgen of Ise Province was offering to share, for a night or two, the comforts of his home with me when a distant, 
bemused expression came over his face as though at the recollection of a joke told him earlier that day; then, to a degree I would not have thought possible in one whose normal manner was so formal, that studiedly dour professorial expression gave way for an instant to one that positively beamed, illuminated from within by the sound of a beloved voice. So worn out, not even sure I was on the right road, 
I forgot myself awhile watching in weary amazement as his wife came and went, the two of them giving the impression of having long perfected some grave and complex dance known only to them, one of accord and the affection of two people moving hand-in-hand in the same direction, both possessed by desire while knowing themselves to be the source of that desire. But I am so tired, I heard my own voice say, one of them, that startlingly cruel, intrusive voice I hate, darkening everything, how sick I am of listening to it, and of having to go on! But after some time had passed once again I forgot all about it as I sat there, the witness of this marvel that brought peace to my heart or, perhaps, a hidden joy of my own, one I had so long considered extinct. When Yūgen fell on hard times and was dragged down into the most humiliating poverty, his wife made up her mind one day to have her long beautiful hair cut short so that she could sell it and he could afford to invite all their friends to an evening of laughter and drinking, renga competitions, and the conversation of those who have known one another for a long time, the kind look and humorous word that make it seem possible to live again. I think of her sometimes. Moon, come down and come alone. I have to tell you all about Akechi’s wife. — Bashō, translated by Franz Wright

THE WAY OUT The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud; the red splatter, abstraction, on the door speaks to the angel and the constellations. The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon. And the loud hammering of the land behind speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs, we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea. All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage. Music of one child carried into the desert; firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid. Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain. The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs, the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening. Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain. Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child. The meaning beginning to move, which is the song. Music of those who have walked out of slavery. Into that journey where all things speak to all things refusing to accept the curse, and taking for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world, all creation being created in one image, creation. This is not the past walking into the future, the walk is painful, into the present, the dance not visible as dance until much later. These dancers are discoverers of God. We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song. Out of a life of building lack on lack: the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith: an army who came to the ocean: the walkers who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou, city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo, the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes, swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March: all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man. Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world. Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death by his disciples carried from Jerusalem in blackness journeying to find his journey to whatever he was loving with his life. The wilderness journey through which we move under the whirlwind truth into the new, the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night: faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in. Barbarian music, a new song. Acknowledging opened water, possibility: open like a woman to this meaning. In a time of building statues of the stars, valuing certain partial ferocious skills while past us the chill and immense wilderness spreads its one-color wings until we know rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea, the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find. What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey. Ways to discover. The song of the way in.