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Under the roof is the empty room papered in requiem blue. Partiers crowd the burned kitchen, gold fixtures hook to cheap lath. What is it they can tell you about absence how it abates, takes names Becomes a wall with windows faced on a formal garden, content To accept the thin rain. The syllable forgives the words that need it, a sentence Badly written, epigraphs scrawled thoughtlessly in books. Book where the hero confronts a dark riddle, book where the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped. What force brought them forward stooping at the lintel, up the chipped steps To the blue door in the unbuilt tower, half-built, the new stone.

I

The stroll from my cell along the path above the donkeys past a door open, a door shut and a strong smell of wood and cigarettes ends where music helps white marguerites cut through the masonry. * Dark for words with a clicking wren a yellow tit and over the clover a shovel and a rustle of grain. He’s training calves with shouts and food to follow him to another field before the second bell. * Broom loops over the buttercups. These names give birth to cones and needles, ferns with mini-sacs of pollen attached. It only takes one shot of spittle on green for my brother to explain the sexual life of the forest and honeybees. * Simon says he would like to live alone in a cottage with a garden, no humans, no obligations.  Solitary I prefer a pod while he likes hives. We confess we both wear armor outside our habitats. * Water was our first armor before our skin. Then came the bristle of sunshine. And a thickening of blood into oil or syrup in the lower veins. * I hate the thistledown covering my prototype now interior layer cowering at power or shout, but can laugh with the one who has sap under his skin pouring the bucket the hand is carrying. * Brother, help me find an animal who will rescue me from sharp delirium of fear beyond armor and my friends the birds by an open window:  to be clear would be wonderful. A sigh without the ghostly gasps that accompany a certain voice. Still I still do desire more of the kind no one can see or hear. Not that second, rasping breath of triumph. Find me instead more like the breathy Saint Bernard. But a little dog A cask of brandy hanging at his neck

I The bartender Has eyes the color of ripe apricots Easy to please as a cash register he Enjoys art and good jokes. Squish Goes the painting Squirt Goes the poem He We Laugh. II It is not easy to remember that other people died besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker Died looking for beauty in the world of the bartender This person, that person, this person, that person died looking for beauty Even the bartender died III Dante blew his nose And his nose came off in his hand Rimbaud broke his throat Trying to cough Dada is not funny It is a serious assault On art Because art Can be enjoyed by the bartender. IV The bartender is not the United States Or the intellectual Or the bartender He is every bastard that does not cry When he reads this poem.

I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain or happiness like candles lighting the entire soft lace of the air around the full length of your hair/a shower organized by God in brown and auburn undulations luminous like particles of flame But now I do retrieve an afternoon of apricots and water interspersed with cigarettes and sand and rocks we walked across: How easily you held my hand beside the low tide of the world Now I do relive an evening of retreat a bridge I left behind where all the solid heat of lust and tender trembling lay as cruel and as kind as passion spins its infinite tergiversations in between the bitter and the sweet Alone and longing for you now I do

I am not a poet because I live in the actual world where fear divides light I have no protection against the real evils and money which is the world where most lives are spent I am not a poet because I cannot sing about lost kingdoms of righteousness instead I see a woman in a blue parka crying on the street today without hope from despair I am not a poet for there is nothing I can say in smart turns to deflect oncoming blows of every day's inexistence that creeps into the contemporary horizon I am not a poet but a witness to bear the empty space that becomes hearts if left to loiter or linger without a life to share I've seen sorrow on joy street and heard the blur of the hurdy-gurdy and I too know what evening means but this is not real—poetry is and from this have I partaken as my eyes grow into the evolved dark

for Quincy T. Trouppe Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table moving away, snaking down, screwing its stitched magic into chitlin circuit air, its comma seams spinning toward breakdown, dipping, like a hipster bebopping a knee-dip stride, in the charlie parker forties wrist curling, like a swan’s neck behind a slick black back cupping an invisible ball of dreams & you there, father, regal, as an african, obeah man sculpted out of wood, from a sacred tree, of no name, no place, origin thick branches branching down, into cherokee & someplace else lost way back in africa, the sap running dry crossing from north carolina into georgia, inside grandmother mary’s womb, where your mother had you in the violence of that red soil ink blotter news, gone now, into blood graves of american blues, sponging rococo truth long gone as dinosaurs the agent-oranged landscape of former names absent of african polysyllables, dry husk, consonants there now, in their place, names, flat, as polluted rivers & that guitar string smile always snaking across some virulent, american, redneck’s face scorching, like atomic heat, mushrooming over nagasaki & hiroshima, the fever blistered shadows of it all inked, as etchings, into sizzled concrete but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths of white major league legends, of who was better than who beating them at their own crap game, with killer bats, as bud powell swung his silence into beauty of a josh gibson home run, skittering across piano keys of bleachers shattering all manufactured legends up there in lights struck out white knights, on the risky edge of amazement awe, the miraculous truth sluicing through steeped & disguised in the blues confluencing, like the point at the cross when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who like old sachel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch before coming back with a hard, high, fast one, is slicker sliding, & quicker than a professional hitman— the deadliness of it all, the sudden strike like that of the “brown bomber’s” crossing right of sugar ray robinson’s, lightning, cobra bite & you, there, father, through it all, catching rhythms of chono pozo balls, drumming, like conga beats into your catcher’s mitt hard & fast as “cool papa” bell jumping into bed before the lights went out of the old, negro baseball league, a promise, you were father, a harbinger, of shock waves, soon come

How do we come to be here next to each other in the night Where are the stars that show us to our love inevitable Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness and the rain falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh the black men waiting on the corner for a womanly mirage I am amazed by peace It is this possibility of you asleep and breathing in the quiet air

Passing the American graveyard, for my birthday the crosses stuttering, white on tropical green, the years’ quick focus of faces I do not remember . . . The palm trees stalking like deliberate giants for my birthday, and all the hot adolescent memories seen through a screen of water . . . For my birthday thrust into the adult and actual: expected to perform the action, not to ponder the reality beyond the fact, the man standing upright in the dream.

What will we do when there is nobody left to kill? * 40,000 gallons of oil gushing into the ocean But I sit on top this mountainside above the Pacific checking out the flowers the California poppies orange as I meet myself in heat I’m wondering where’s the Indians? all this filmstrip territory all this cowboy sagaland: not a single Indian in sight 40,000 gallons gushing up poison from the deepest seabeds every hour 40,000 gallons while experts international while new pollutants swallow the unfathomable still: no Indians I’m staring hard around me past the pinks the poppies and the precipice that let me see the wide Pacific unsuspecting even trivial by virtue of its vast surrender I am a woman searching for her savagery even if it’s doomed Where are the Indians? * Crow Nose Little Bear Slim Girl Black Elk Fox Belly the people of the sacred trees and rivers precious to the stars that told old stories to the night how do we follow after you? falling snow before the firelight and buffalo as brothers to the man how do we follow into that? * They found her facedown where she would be dancing to the shadow drums that humble birds to silent flight They found her body held its life dispelled by ice my life burns to destroy Anna Mae Pictou Aquash slain on The Trail of Broken Treaties bullet lodged in her brain/hands and fingertips dismembered who won the only peace that cannot pass from mouth to mouth * Memory should agitate the pierced bone crack of one in pushed-back horror pushed-back pain as when I call out looking for my face among the wounded coins to toss about or out entirely the legends of Geronimo of Pocahontas now become a squat pedestrian cement inside the tomb of all my trust as when I feel you isolate among the hungers of the trees a trembling hidden tinder so long unsolicited by flame as when I accept my sister dead when there should be a fluid holiness of spirits wrapped around the world redeemed by women whispering communion * I find my way by following your spine Your heart indivisible from my real wish we compelled the moon into the evening when you said, “No, I will not let go of your hand.” * Now I am diving for a tide to take me everywhere Below the soft Pacific spoils a purple girdling of the globe impregnable * Last year the South African Minister of Justice described Anti-Government Disturbances as Part of a Worldwide Trend toward the Breakdown of Established Political and Cultural Orders * God knows I hope he’s right.