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Kissing the bankteller outside his stairs In Brighton, MA I cannot lie. I felt the hope That we once felt, if only for an instant O the lovely bankteller, like a moose he Rode my spirit quite outside my clothes And chrysanthemums sprouted I assure you Out my nipples when he kissed them. And the pureness of not knowing him at all Was really what we all feel when we enter this earth. There is a newness to the best things that cannot Be excelled and old things like old love die and rot. There are old ideas in the world that should be forgotten There are old ideas and old phrases that should at least Be recycled for others There are old plans now that should be new. There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die. Follow me, I am the crusader of the new My spirit is a plastic rod that channels all our births. And in the mouths of the little beasts, we shall find the great Ocean that spits up black bugs all glittering on its shores. You know there is an anthem to the ages. There is an anthem of the ages. This is that anthem This is that anthem

You're telling that story again about your childhood, when you were five years old and rode your blue bicycle from Copenhagen to Espergaerde, and it was night and snowing by the time you arrived, and your grandparents were so relieved to see you, because all day no one knew where you were, you had vanished. We sit at our patio table under a faded green umbrella, drinking wine in California's blue autumn, red stars of roses along the fence, trellising over the roof of our ramshackle garage. Too soon the wine glasses will be empty, our stories told, the house covered with pine needles the wind has shaken from the trees. Other people will live here. We will vanish like children who traveled far in the dark, stars of snow in their hair, riding to enchanted Espergaerde.

The first time I write my full name Jacqueline Amanda Woodson without anybody's help on a clean white page in my composition notebook, I know if I wanted to I could write anything. Letters becoming words, words gathering meaning, becoming thoughts outside my head becoming sentences written by Jacqueline Amanda Woodson

Before I go let me thank the man who mugs you, taking your last paycheck, thank the boss who steals your tips, thank the women who may break you. I thank the pens that run out on you midsentence, the flame that singes your hair, the ticket you can't use because it's torn. Let me thank the stars that remind you the eyes that were stars are now holes. Let me thank the lake that drowns you, the sun that makes your face old. And thank the street your car dies in. And thank the brother you find unconcious with bloody arms, thank the needle that assists in doing him in—so much a part of you. No thanks to the skin forgetting the hands it welcomed, your hands refusing to recall what they happened upon. How blessed is the body you move in—how gone.

In a dream, a young Baraka slaps five with my father. They ask when I last got some pussy or whooped someone’s ass? On one side of the street are the black poets (their closed memberships, spider-fingered hand-shakes, invitation-only parties) tossing my journal with my father— Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit! I’m soft-spoken. He’s bullhorn. I believe in breaths. We’re both sensitive. I do not deserve to be his son. I didn’t suffer like my father. Don’t fit in any boxes with bars. Never served time (except once at Bellevue for 17 days). I retreat in ambiguity. Live between the lines. Prefer shadow to light. I do girl push-ups. Write on the mirror with my mother’s lipstick. I’m nothing like my father. I spend my recesses reading When the People Could Fly, Black Skin, White Masks, & Metamorphosis. I visit Harlem with my 35mm in search of jazzmen. I’m paranoid. My palms stay moist. Long before I wake from this dream, there’s your voice & Baraka’s, the broken limbs ghosting our family tree, you and Baraka mouthing to me:This life. . . is a . . relay . . race . . . and in a single hand motion—Catch! And that look on your faces. The pause. The lean in. The reveal.

For Grandfather, in Bangkok I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards away from your casket, away from their expert invasions, kneeling by the order of our births alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics, the family at your death keeps to form, having to act out that love of endings. I can say the little I know of how you lived is your patient gaze in old photographs, surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever they’d been taken, children barely known but abided on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place pennies in the dead man’s mouth to remind us of the portions left behind. You pay the debt, someone says,you give your something solid back, push your currency up against the open, up against the father tongue. It’s the formal silence we love, the hush that’s planned, the good answer, monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know to whip your burial cloth exactly three times over the altar flame to purify countless threads. Who know when to kneel, when to back away from the casket. The casket itself carved patiently, inlaid with the images, portions left behind of silver shrunken disciples, each framed to each then framed again by squares of alabaster scrollwork whittled into black wood: the whole teak surface worried, Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold, splintered, then resplintered, puzzled with lapis. The eastern window’s been slivered open, to make the sun stab the craftmen’s metallic fretwork. The mourners too, suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting to kneel. When a few clouds eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders, the frame and scrimshaw, so that we stand briefly in the room’s darkened largeness, next to me someone whispers, how your vessel is rented, a work to be given back.

i Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson breached, millions of gallons of it north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site, East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South, Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl, Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately in hurricane sky. ii Perhaps I make too much of it, that time, Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped in some sort of liquid to protect them from dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused — that time, night shift, press-machine shop on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in, fixed up, because the work you do is around fire your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right. iii When the mind is clear, to hear the sound of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude of syllables pronounced. When the mind is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio, at a holy water font, a mother washes her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident so that they’ll heal. iv So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted, Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole. v Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels, in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity the greatest number of children in United States history are, now, incarcerated, having been sentenced by law. vi A comic dimension to it, on this F train to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you, but, see, he was stabbed in the face with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — here, look, he’ll show you — a white-and-pink-colored iris.

When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field, It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness That my mother could not console herself to the waste And insisted on having it picked over with human hands, Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets And the hands had long since gone into the factories. No matter how often my father pointed this out, She worried it the way I’ve worried the extra words In poems that I conceived with the approximate Notion that each stanza should have the same number Of lines and each line the same number of syllables— And disregarded it, telling myself a ripple Or botch on the surface, like the stutter of a speaker, Is all I have to affirm the deep fluency below. The Hebrews distrusted Greek poetry (which embodied Harmony and symmetry, and, therefore, revision) Not for aesthetic reasons, but because they believed That to change the first words, which rose unsmelted From the trance, amounted to sacrilege against God. In countries where, because of the gross abundance Of labor, it’s unlawful to import harvesting machines, I see the women in the fields and think of how, When my mother used to pick, you could tell Her row by the bare stalks and the scant poundage That tumbled from her sack so pristinely white And devoid of burrs, it seemed to have already Passed through the spiked mandibles of the gin. Dr. Williams said of Eliot that his poems were so Cautiously wrought that they seemed to come To us already digested in all four stomachs of the cow. What my father loved about my mother was not Just the beauty of her body and face, but the practice Of her ideas and the intelligence of her hands As they made the house that abides in us still As worry and bother, but also the perfect freedom beyond— As cleanliness is next to godliness but is not God.

spare us your burial rites spare us the first rib the flood, the resurrection spare us your dairy & meats your belief in a life after this one heaven’s a city we’ve been priced out of our mothers fled for more affordable children for the price of liver heaven wants nothing to do with pleasure on earth on this the occasion of my brother’s wedding i need something awful done to my body heaven’s a boy who wants me to crawl through his mother’s midnight-window heaven’s the condom splitting into light heaven’s not a place more a wound i make & pass through when we’re done he asks how many men i’ve fucked this month & not loved spare me the quilt & blankets spare me the look in his eyes when he takes me careful as a poison inside him spare me the lecture on the survival of my body & i will spare you my body

when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis you think easy fix. greek in origin. an act of guarding. east of here a small temple. inside parishioners strip nude as armless statues, their stone genitals hardening under a chemist’s glare. the garden out front fecund & tended. the garden inside bare. when i say tenofovir disoproxil you think chemical names. saint names. names without origin. an unpronounceable string of letters. the generic names of petty angels. the drug’s molecular makeup applied in & around the eyes & lips. the names of viruses & blind trials. the kept-vial of love. the unknowable side effects of blood. when i say oral emtricitabine you think once a day swallow a small sun & all hymn in you comes undone the way a lit match deads the smell of a public bathroom when i say nucleotide analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor you think thirsty epidemic you push the blue pill through its foil you know each new medicine trails our dead behind it like wedding cans listen you can hear them now can’t you?