Poemunity — your poem community

rustle plastic bags of outside food in movie theaters/talk out of turn in the swallow-dark light/believe trash should be/as confetti/everywhere in the viaducts’ shadow/souring in gutters’ craw/jaywalk with the urgency of sloth /split verbs meaningfully/do or want to do better/ tattoo so you will never mis- remember our names/name ourselves Precious and Mercedes/must have some Indian in us/search for signifiers in eyes/ bright earlobes/textures of hair/ are color-stuck/are disabused our definitions of love/love and don’t know how to call it/ grieve any number of nouns/mostly people/ pets/preoccupy with memories at the repast/recall that day at the beach that / leads us to days at the beach grilling/meat browning/its purpose/it’s children on the sandbar tossing a ball/the dog biting the surf/finally some mirth/we carry for keeps.

All cousins know the electric slide/ how to spell/despite the stink of it/chitterlings or chitlins/the odor of pig feet or catfish under a steam of vinegar/ believe blood is the most important thing/bring family up for better or worse/better the family or bemoan who just won’t do right/ learn early the power fist/dap/pound/and running man/invent glorious ways to say “brother” with intricacies of hands/we cool/give elders their due/cull histories in quilts/set records/set beats/set rights/set Black Jesus/love our tannin skin/drown yowls in jazz/ watch blocks bristle heat/in the hundreds/it’s past sundown/Mecca’s everywhere now.

This sun was mine and yours; we shared it. Who’s suffering behind the golden silk, who’s dying? A woman beating her dry breasts cried out: ‘Cowards, they’ve taken my children and torn them to shreds, you’ve killed them gazing at the fire-flies at dusk with a strange look, lost in blind thought.’ The blood was drying on a hand that a tree made green, a warrior was asleep clutching the lance that cast light against his side. It was ours, this sun, we saw nothing behind the gold embroidery then the messengers came, dirty and breathless, stuttering unintelligible words twenty days and nights on the barren earth with thorns only twenty days and nights feeling the bellies of the horses bleeding and not a moment’s break to drink the rain-water. You told them to rest first and then to speak, the light had dazzled you. They died saying ‘We don’t have time’, touching some rays of the sun. You’d forgotten that no one rests. A woman howled ‘Cowards’, like a dog in the night. Once she would have been beautiful like you with wet mouth, veins alive beneath the skin, with love. This sun was ours; you kept all of it, you wouldn’t follow me. And it was then I found out about those things behind the gold and the silk: we don’t have time. The messengers were right.

Our sweet companions—sharing your bunk and your bed The versts and the versts and the versts and a hunk of your bread The wheels' endless round The rivers, streaming to ground The road. . . Oh the heavenly the Gypsy the early dawn light Remember the breeze in the morning, the steppe silver-bright Wisps of blue smoke from the rise And the song of the wise Gypsy czar. . . In the dark midnight, under the ancient trees' shroud We gave you sons as perfect as night, sons As poor as the night And the nightingale chirred Your might. . . We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared The fierce bonfire's glow And there, on the carpet below, Fell stars. . .

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Thanks, no thanks, to eternal life. What pleasure watching my old house broken-beamed, grey elephant brought to its knees? White ash—gone the way of trilobites and horsehair fern, even the nuclear-proof cockroach in deep-freeze. Cueballs knock each other randomly; reverse. the tape and movement looks the same, illustrating the end of time: things happen, but don't matter. And if Lethe strips you like a swimmer from his trunks, where will "I" be? If Heaven without you is Hell, how will I know? A forever of no-never-mind does not appeal, God's heart a cold, contracting cinder. Give me the white light, the slit of split-second calm, and knowing over is over.

If they would only just beat or shoot me, but they wanted soul substance, to harbor that like that, so I could never move from this place. So they reach crackled hands inside and hold it open for raking ... We in a shit rustle, the way in ramble and camaraderie, brown hand of whose mother makes its smooth noise over my mouth? The burden of saying some thing, a head- nodding, and I want to be in- side of your knowing. Who laid their head on the disappeared’s pillow? One minute a person licks your ear, the next, you cannot see your own white breath. We gotta head on over to the party way out in Bushwick because we’re lost, and our flesh is on fire. There’s a man walking behind us. And growing. This is what I tell him: I am not a boy in anyone’s body. I am not a black in a black body. I will not kowtow inside your opposites. How the world blisters you. How hunger left you statued. • One falls past the lip of some black unknown, where time, they say, ends. We got us a sugar- mouth, a bit feeding, walk in circles in circular rooms built so precisely for our shapes, hold the figure that is the body that is, of course, me. I stroke the feather that feeds me, that lines my cage floor with minor luxuries, I say “mama” in its wanting sugary mouth. What is the difference between ash and coal, between dark and darkened, between love and addiction on Dekalb at 2 am, and I fall drunk from a ruinous taxi, already ruined from before before, the absent weight screams into your breath,you are no good, no good... The space between I and It. Lolling. The Ibibio man was not born in his cowboy hat. Even his throat must ache like tired teeth. • Look what I am holding! Not desire, but infinite multiplicity, the mouth of existence. To sing the blue song of longing, its webbed feet along jungle floor. What of our mechanical arm, our off-melody? Purpose in the gathering, I know, dear self. It rains and we think, God, or we think Universe. I say, portent across the wind. When wind is wrought, whole song fallen from its lip, some black unknown, where they say, time ends. What speech into hard God breath just as night park is godless? What of a silver cube in the mouth?This is our wandering.

’T was merry Christmas when he came, Our little boy beneath the sod; And brighter burned the Christmas flame, And merrier sped the Christmas game, Because within the house there lay A shape as tiny as a fay— The Christmas gift of God! In wreaths and garlands on the walls The holly hung its ruby balls, The mistletoe its pearls; And a Christmas tree’s fantastic fruits Woke laughter like a choir of flutes From happy boys and girls. For the mirth, which else had swelled as shrill As a school let loose to its errant will, Was softened by the thought, That in a dim hushed room above A mother’s pains in a mother’s love Were only just forgot. The jest, the tale, the toast, the glee, All took a sober tone; We spoke of the babe upstairs, as we Held festival for him alone. When the bells rang in the Christmas morn, It scarcely seemed a sin to say That they rang because that babe was born, Not less than for the sacred day. Ah! Christ forgive us for the crime Which drowned the memories of the time In a merely mortal bliss! We owned the error when the mirth Of another Christmas lit the hearth Of every home but this. When, in that lonely burial-ground, With every Christmas sight and sound Removed or shunned, we kept A mournful Christmas by the mound Where little Willie slept! Ah, hapless mother! darling wife! I might say nothing more, And the dull cold world would hold The story of that precious life As amply told! Shall we, shall you and I, before That world’s unsympathetic eyes Lay other relics from our store Of tender memories? What could it know of the joy and love That throbbed and smiled and wept above An unresponsive thing? And who could share the ecstatic thrill With which we watched the upturned bill Of our bird at its living spring? Shall we tell how in the time gone by, Beneath all changes of the sky, And in an ordinary home Amid the city’s din, Life was to us a crystal dome, Our babe the flame therein? Ah! this were jargon on the mart; And though some gentle friend, And many and many a suffering heart, Would weep and comprehend, Yet even these might fail to see What we saw daily in the child— Not the mere creature undefiled, But the winged cherub soon to be. That wandering hand which seemed to reach At angel finger-tips, And that murmur like a mystic speech Upon the rosy lips, That something in the serious face Holier than even its infant grace, And that rapt gaze on empty space, Which made us, half believing, say, “Ah, little wide-eyed seer! who knows But that for you this chamber glows With stately shapes and solemn shows?” Which touched us, too, with vague alarms, Lest in the circle of our arms We held a being less akin To his parents in a world of sin Than to beings not of clay: How could we speak in human phrase, Of such scarce earthly traits and ways, What would not seem A doting dream, In the creed of these sordid days? No! let us keep Deep, deep, In sorrowing heart and aching brain, This story hidden with the pain, Which since that blue October night When Willie vanished from our sight, Must haunt us even in our sleep. In the gloom of the chamber where he died, And by that grave which, through our care, From Yule to Yule of every year, Is made like spring to bloom; And where, at times, we catch the sigh As of an angel floating nigh, Who longs but has not power to tell That in that violet-shrouded cell Lies nothing better than the shell Which he had cast aside— By that sweet grave, in that dark room, We may weave at will for each other’s ear, Of that life, and that love, and that early doom, The tale which is shadowed here: To us alone it will always be As fresh as our own misery; But enough, alas! for the world is said, In the brief “Here lieth” of the dead!

In a world where all the heroes are pilots with voices like God he brought her a strand of some woman’s hair to wear on her wing. She looked sideways at the ground silent behind the cloudy film covering her eyes knowing she would be his forever. They cruised the city nights each one spiralling away from the other but always coming home to gather stories. Dark streets bright tavern lights drunks filled with beer in the gutters. The flicker of stars shaped like a hunter’s arrow bent stars that twinkled like babies’ eyes. No babies for them. She was an outcast. He a loner. A perfect pair. Winters had made him wise and he avoided the single nests of summer. He told her about things she could see. How the dismal cover of clouds roils and explodes and the ground aches like an old woman’s knee. How wood rots against the tide good for hunting grub. How to fade and fall back into the wind. He translated her pulse into near-language. Their poetry so personal even Peterson’s Field Guide could not tap it. Only a stray hunter saw it. Shook his head once thinking it a trick of wind and wing then turned his eyes north to search for the simple flight of Brant or Canadian. Those patterns he could easily understand. That last night they drank from the river. Sucked its delicate cusps of mold sang anti social songs as if they were humans. When he flicked his handsome head to catch the drift of wind she even managed a single tear. She waited through days and nights of grief. Circled the city less then settled on the wires. The metallic conductor captured her eyes. She remembered how he proudly sang her name as he pranced from pole-top to KV line. One last fluff of feathers. One sigh for all the unnested summers. One single scratch one electrical surge of power of love. Then she fell smiling. A trick he had taught her.

Come and let us live my Deare, Let us love and never feare, What the sowrest Fathers say: Brightest Sol that dies to day Lives againe as blithe to morrow, But if we darke sons of sorrow Set; o then, how long a Night Shuts the Eyes of our short light! Then let amorous kisses dwell On our lips, begin and tell A Thousand, and a Hundred, score An Hundred, and a Thousand more, Till another Thousand smother That, and that wipe of another. Thus at last when we have numbred Many a Thousand, many a Hundred; Wee’l confound the reckoning quite, And lose our selves in wild delight: While our joyes so multiply, As shall mocke the envious eye.