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Crows and struts. He’s got feathers! He’s got guts! Oh, the rooster struts and crows. What’s he thinking? No one knows.

The exhausted dream I live in is scattered with teeth, the little tombstones of Freud that, plowed under, grow up warriors. My son buries his between pillow and case so no one can exchange them for foundling dollars— he wants to string them together, the miser. The rule is you lose a tooth for every child. The new baby grinds, gnashes, butts at the inexplicable ache inside— the dog that won’t shake off. Yet he gums prettily between howls. So smile! repeats his jack o'lanterned brother, as I do, falsely, as Death does.

To sow the remote morose root. To sow the virtuous standby. The backup fodder-crop suffers not from seasonal vicissitudes, mildew and blast, caterpillar attack. Under Saturn sing the golden-sickled beet. Under Saturn sing the ringed mangelwurzel. The great turnip (the dick reuben!). The pickled paucity-strick stew.

Love faded in my heart— I thought it was dead. Now new flowers start, Fresh leaves outspread. Why do these flowers upstart And again the leaves spread? Oh, when will it be dead— This root that tears my heart!

The girl’s father laughs a little too hard when I say:She knows what’s important in life as his daughter whips the dime store jump rope over her head for the twelve thousandth time— laughs as if I’m joking, when really, she has it down— sparkly pink handles grimy with effort, her face obscured by her hair, shins thin and bruised, socks down at the ankles. Abandoned by the rest of the crowd, the concrete square an archipelago, an alignment with rigor the others cannot fathom, she moves with fierce persistence into afternoon, the heft of the handles, smack of the rope— no Double Dutch, limbo, no communal game, but this resolute definition of rhythm, slatted bench shadows lengthening into space, the other kids simply forgetting she’s there, her solitary corner of the playground darkening as the dinner hour approaches, while pigeons pause on their branches, squirrels come down the trunk and stop, with rush hour beyond the fence, cars idling, and the rope’s metronome, forgotten as breath, weaving all the disparate energies of girl— elation, fury, eagerness, song— into one singular strand.

Nothing for days, then a message: “I want to see a fight. An old one,” so I bring a fight to you. You know nothing of these men; even the most famous get to slink in their youth again — for you Foreman is Leviathan, unstoppable; Ali just past his prime flown “home” to muscle back his title. Not sure how you’ll react to violence we lie down again together — your feet in woollen stockings kneadable across my thighs, your mouth close to my ribs and their inmate: a pouting lifer. I fidget and you scold. As Ali opens up with right-hand leads you flinch but soon you’re lost to the screen where he waits it out along the ropes, takes everything Foreman throws. You don’t believe he can soak up all this pain and go on standing; we cheer him on, winter softened in the tropic of his strength. When Ali comes alive to put Foreman on the ground I see a hallelujah look as you turn to face me. “He won,” you say into my cheek. “He did,” I say.

To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago; there is something so 19th-century about it, with its absurd reverse Puritanism. Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger? Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu- riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in this situation. Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt- ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too. Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil- lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious. You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that isn’t a pussy!” But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.” The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’re supposed to be crazy (and are probably proving it). Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes, it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when your only chance is to lose. Fold, and they have got you by the balls— just like the ones you neglected to identify.

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the ChicagoDefender to the Black Americans in the South so they would know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth- place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954 when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa- rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in 1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand- children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money, Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac- ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago, where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi- nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama, who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.

Love in my bosom like a bee Doth suck his sweet; Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet. Within mine eyes he makes his nest, His bed amidst my tender breast; My kisses are his daily feast, And yet he robs me of my rest. Ah, wanton, will ye? And if I sleep, then percheth he With pretty flight, And makes his pillow of my knee The livelong night. Strike I my lute, he tunes the string; He music plays if so I sing; He lends me every lovely thing; Yet cruel he my heart doth sting. Whist, wanton, still ye! Else I with roses every day Will whip you hence, And bind you, when you long to play, For your offense. I’ll shut mine eyes to keep you in, I’ll make you fast it for your sin, I’ll count your power not worth a pin. Alas! what hereby shall I win If he gainsay me? What if I beat the wanton boy With many a rod? He will repay me with annoy, Because a god. Then sit thou safely on my knee, And let thy bower my bosom be; Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee. O Cupid, so thou pity me, Spare not, but play thee!

Wherein she martyrs the mirror: this carnival of stone, her lips dilate the negation—space into starpoint Wherein she, to be both sacrum & wrist— neither the fugitive epidermis, nor the unlocked ashblack— sovereigns the shadow swell as love Wherein she ardors the emptiness open, proof the unanchored Spirit of my silence, her revisions clothing my brightest orgasm— Wherein she says, I can hear you, the seed under the belly’s flesh—love the far shore, she says, For She withdraws the Spring wild Thrust in her mother’s surrender, iron ocean blackened to aurora.