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Sestina Jackson met Text-Deft James on 09/09/09. A Red Hook, BK dock party celebrated Otis Redding’s Birthday. Sestina mouthed along to “The Happy Song,” And TDJ smiled, baring his Cornel West-esque Teeth. Text-Deft’s chops whiter, but same gap. Cigs and java, then shake, as Battery Park Gleamed across the East River. Text-Deft parked His literary, rusty Lincoln Continental nine Blocks from the new IKEA, a small gap Between rusty bumpers scuffed with dings And marker tags. Sestina Solange-esque, Perhaps Solange times ten. All poet, song Lyrics fly from Sestina. She sang songs In Jackson Heights with Granny J parked By her side. This bash? Carnival masque. Now, they swayed to “6-3-4-5-7-8-9,” That’s my number! TD leading Sestina before long. No gap In the music. All Otis —no stopgap. The moon moved, drifted. The songs Kicked. TD whispered over fading Bass: “You wanna walk through the park? Talk about Zadie and Roth and (and and) nine Other scribes?” A nod. SJ: “I’m A. Rich-esque. Gimme Duhamel, Dove, a Clifton-esque Ode. Poetry owns me. I scan tales as a gap Between ghazals and villanelles. B. Collins’s Nine Horses, Espada’s Alabanza. Cathy Song Preaches to perceive heaven. Poet’s Walk Park In the other Red Hook, upstate — riding Up the Metro North — let’s go.” TDJ: “Send tidings My way. We’ll plan a soiree. A rom-com-esque Romp. As we travel to this Norse poet park, We’ll laugh and say ‘mind the gap,’ In droll Brit brogues. What will our song Be? An Otis classic? A dirge to survey Odin’s ninth World?” Nine times the voice and ding Sing, as monotone noises, robot-esque, Order them: watch the gap. Then? The park. Oh! Hucklebuck! Treat her right! Yes, you, Text-Deft James. He says, “I swear by the mud below my feet. When I read, I don’t grind. A great text has great beauty. A great horse, too, has great beauty. Horses, equine, all this Alan from Equus-esque worship at the altar, but then comes the eye spike. Like Odin. I guess we always come back to the eyes. They beat the horse to flies, above, inside, around. They write papers that grind horses into dog grub ... ” Sestina: “My rugged poetic sensibilities allow me to embrace 
extended metaphorical diction of disturbing, lurid carnage. But please, please. Spare your doggish death rattle. First dates occur once. Among the dates’ participants, that is; e.g, me, you. So, if you will, ax the horse talk. I prefer rubbery arms, Espada’s cockroaches, axes on frozen pond sludge. Sibilant rush. Gimme Yusef’s Orpheus. Or Ferlinghetti from Coney Island to North Beach. Gimme Wisława Szymborska (a name I can pronounce, FYI. RIP.) Please. Please, Text-Deft James. Not equinicide. I’ve seen bearded ladies whisper acclaim, whimper shame. Devil nuns. I whisper a clipped utterance of the ineffable. The untied united. Not only ineffable, but tangible ... ” (unsaid: I take my tongue, propelled by chemical soul, and I have a dirty, nasty, downright raunchy time with it. I’m talking sheets off the bed, candles tipped over, shower flooding the bathroom tile. T-shirt grimy from fun crust.That type of night. I, Sestina, won’t share such thoughts. Instead —) “ ... know my resurrected heart beats brick red. Know that I seek poetry in moose lodges, in homeless shelters, in candy shops. I do remember walking down Northern Blvd. with Granny J, begging for sour candy. Bears dipped in sugar: cherry, orange, lime mixed. Let’s hover above this grass. As a kid, I went to Shea Stadium, waved a foam finger, and I was sure I’d marry a Met, maybe Al Leiter. As we stand here in front of this rustic pavilion, I’d like to ask you on another date. The Mets have few home games left, and I’d love some BBQ.”

The wild winds weep, And the night is a-cold; Come hither, Sleep, And my griefs infold: But lo! the morning peeps Over the eastern steeps, And the rustling birds of dawn The earth do scorn. Lo! to the vault Of paved heaven, With sorrow fraught My notes are driven: They strike the ear of night, Make weep the eyes of day; They make mad the roaring winds, And with tempests play. Like a fiend in a cloud With howling woe, After night I do croud, And with night will go; I turn my back to the east, From whence comforts have increas'd; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain.

My name is Johnson— Madam Alberta K. The Madam stands for business. I’m smart that way. I had a HAIR-DRESSING PARLOR Before The depression put The prices lower. Then I had a BARBECUE STAND Till I got mixed up With a no-good man. Cause I had a insurance The WPA Said, We can’t use you Wealthy that way. I said, DON’T WORRY ’BOUT ME! Just like the song, You WPA folks take care of yourself— And I’ll get along. I do cooking, Day’s work, too! Alberta K. Johnson— Madam to you.

Madam, withouten many words Once I am sure ye will or no ... And if ye will, then leave your bourds And use your wit and show it so, And with a beck ye shall me call; And if of one that burneth alway Ye have any pity at all, Answer him fair with & {.} or nay. If it be &, {.} I shall be fain; If it be nay, friends as before; Ye shall another man obtain, And I mine own and yours no more.

This face had no use for light, took none of it, Grew cavernous against stars, bore into noon A dark of midnight by its own resources. Yet where it lay in sleep, where the pillows held it With the blind plaster over it and the four walls Keeping the night carefully, it was undone. Sixty-watt light, squared to a window frame, Across a well of air, across wind and window Leaped and made shine the dark face in its sleep.

Impossible to wield The acreage of the fabric that unfolded, Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field: The distance from one Christmas to the next When he was only seven Was aching there; a foreign city flexed Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded. Too heavy to outrun, Too slow to measure what it underwent, Though gradually the passage of the sun, Unmanageable in its train of light, Seemed almost to respond As he yanked the yards of stuff in like a kite And gathered the brocade that trailed beyond His arms' reach to the scale of measurement, However strange the weave That writhed about the working of his hands: The footage too atrocious to believe, Printed with corpses; Greece; the falls of salmon; Her upturned silken wrist He would have torn out history to examine; His father's final blessing, which he missed. However far he comes or where he stands, At last, and limb by limb, Contour by contour, that unfolded cape Settles ever more fittingly on him. His forehead is the line of the sky's vault, His shoulders trace the ground, His palms the ways he wandered by default, And in his gestures those he knew are found. What shape the day discovers is his shape.

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint Stands nearer than God stands to our distress, And one small candle shines, but not so faint As the far lights of everlastingness, I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day Where Christ is hanging, rather pray To something more like my own clay, Not too divine; For, once, perhaps my little saint Before he got his niche and crown, Had one short stroll about the town; It brings him closer, just that taint— And anyone can wash the paint Off our poor faces, his and mine! Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as gold, But still, with just the proper trace Of earthliness on his shining wedding face; And then gone suddenly blank and old The hateful day of the divorce: Stuart got his, hands down, of course Crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse: But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best,— He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest. It seems too funny all we other rips Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships.— It’s funny too, how easily we sink, One might put up a monument, I think To half the world and cut across it “Lost at Sea!” I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night— No, it’s no use this penny light— Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown— The trees of Calvary are where they were, When we are sure that we can spare The tallest, let us go and strike it down And leave the other two still standing there. I, too, would ask Him to remember me If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see. Oh! quiet Christ who never knew The poisonous fangs that bite us through And make us do the things we do, See how we suffer and fight and die, How helpless and how low we lie, God holds You, and You hang so high, Though no one looking long at You, Can think You do not suffer too, But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree What can You know, what can You really see Of this dark ditch, the soul of me! We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun, Without paying so heavily for it That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one. I could hardly bear The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk, The thick, close voice of musk, The jessamine music on the thin night air, Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere — The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair, Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street. I think my body was my soul, And when we are made thus Who shall control Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet, Who shall teach us To thrust the world out of our heart: to say, till perhaps in death, When the race is run, And it is forced from us with our last breath “Thy will be done”? If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things. As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings— Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings! The temperate, well-worn smile The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own: And afterwards the child’s, for a little while, With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes So soon to change, and make you feel how quick The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick— (How does one though?) quite early on, Of long green pastures under placid skies, One might be walking now with patient truth. What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth, When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone? There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen, With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat, The dainty head held high against the painted green And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet. Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring To me to-day: a radiance on the wall, So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small, Sapless and lined like a dead leaf, All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief! And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair— Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay—? Or could—with any one of the old crew, But oh! these boys! the solemn way They take you and the things they say— This “I have only as long as you” When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two— Although at heart perhaps—God! if it were Only the face, only the hair! If Jim had written to me as he did to-day A year ago—and now it leaves me cold— I know what this means, old, old,old: Et avec ça—mais on a vécu, tout se paie. That is not always true: there was my Mother (well at least the dead are free!) Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am, Monty too; The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so patiently; The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me—and what of me ? But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity. If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came; Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day. Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year’s May, No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday; For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way, The shadows are never the same. “Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags— Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep: Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags, For so He giveth His belovèd sleep. Oh! He will take us stripped and done, Driven into His heart. So we are won: Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings— I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things. But I shall not be in them. Let Him take The finer ones, the easier to break. And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the perfumes, Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms. In silks and in gemlike wines; Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shines And overhead the lancet-window glows With golds and crimsons you could almost drink To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think There was the scent in every red and yellow rose Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey, And much too quiet. No one here, Why, this is awful, this is fear! Nothing to see, no face. Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space As if the world was ended. Dead at last! Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast. These to go on with and alone, to the slow end: No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend: Out of the long procession, black or white or red Not one left now to say “Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here your head”. Only the doll’s house looking on the Park To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out, very dark. With, upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids' footsteps overhead, Then utter silence and the empty world—the room—the bed— The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries out in me. But nearly: very soon to be A handful of forgotten dust— There must be someone. Christ! there must, Tell me there will be someone. Who? If there were no one else, could it be You? How old was Mary out of whom you cast So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s house And stood and looked at You through tears. I think she must have known by those The thing, for what it was that had come to her. For some of us there is a passion, I suppose, So far from earthly cares and earthly fears That in its stillness you can hardly stir Or in its nearness, lift your hand, So great that you have simply got to stand Looking at it through tears, through tears. Then straight from these there broke the kiss, I think You must have known by this The thing, for what it was, that had come to You: She did not love You like the rest, It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best, She gave You something altogether new. And through it all, from her, no word, She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard: Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair, Or by the wet cheek lying there, And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all through the day That You can change the things for which we care, But even You, unless You kill us, not the way. This, then was peace for her, but passion too. I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew, The only one that I would care to take Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake. Almost as happy as the carven dead In some dim chancel lying head by head We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through— One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life, Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his “Are you there?” And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs. So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her of night and day, It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away: But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dream could she have cared so much ? She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch. And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees Of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears, And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did, remember these, Though they lived there a thousand years. Outside, too gravely looking at me. He seems to stand, And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit came Unwillingly back, what could it claim Of those calm eyes, that quiet speech, Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach, The scarred, not quite human hand ?— Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings When it has learned so long not to think, not to be, Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things That I shall not see! I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head: When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead: And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bed Thinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said, He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt! And most of all in Holy Week When there was no one else to see I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly, If He had ever seemed to notice me Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

Velroy de-jays the séance-turntables, spinning black water, scratching out full moons with red and blue curves of hip hop. In the dance club, bodies are a collection of sunrise songs in reverse. Corey wears her cat-eye contacts and no panties. There’s the bathroom-stall eagle medicine with Ecstasy placed on the tongue. She handles the lace like a Kiowa church hymn. Dee is Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Fort Sill Apache. He couldn’t enroll into any tribe but he can grass dance, bump and grind, and do the Jerry Lewis. Black girls love him. Stoney has four wives, Indian way. He has ghost medicine and carries a small white ball of clay. He sells peyote and coke to the white boys. I have a southern accent. I killed a Lakota man, he was a Rollin ’20. It was with a shotgun. It was powwow season, I fancy danced.

They say you can jinx a poem if you talk about it before it is done. If you let it out too early, they warn, your poem will fly away, and this time they are absolutely right. Take the night I mentioned to you I wanted to write about the madmen, as the newspapers so blithely call them, who attack art, not in reviews, but with breadknives and hammers in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam. Actually, they are the real artists, you said, spinning the ice in your glass. The screwdriver is their brush. The real vandals are the restorers, you went on, slowly turning me upside-down, the ones in the white doctor's smocks who close the wound in the landscape, and thus ruin the true art of the mad. I watched my poem fly down to the front of the bar and hover there until the next customer walked in— then I watched it fly out the open door into the night and sail away, I could only imagine, over the dark tenements of the city. All I had wished to say was that art was also short, as a razor can teach with a slash or two, that it only seems long compared to life, but that night, I drove home alone with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart except the faint hope that I might catch a glimpse of the thing in the fan of my headlights, maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp, poor unwritten bird, its wings folded, staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

Yes, a chalice: held up high As if it were an elixir instead of dead-leaf soup. But peek out with your watery eye. That's right: over the lip of the thing you're in. An opera house can smell like iron, cologne. Aesthetes and snoozers a thrill Mired under chandeliers, but Can thrills be mired? Of course! And smells Can make you sad, even When they're clouding up the hall near midnight, And everyone is clapping, clapping. The audience stinks of aging privilege. A chalice that might have held a Eucharist, Or a swimmer made of kissable puddles, But instead it holds you With your impulses which molder—O What do you know, Unreason fornicating with itself? You get heavier when I plea. Are you nothing but chemistry With a sick sense of humor? Willy-nilly chemicals elope! But why bother to marry When all they have to do is fuck My mind and make you justice of the peace? Are there no annulments in the offing? You are not so interesting. You care too much, or not enough. Inhale bad breath from the row behind. Sniff back what Spilleth, spilleth as if from a nose. (Do Renaissance verbs turn you quaint?) Nettles on your funk-wet wings. You're greedy To escape from and into The vowel in the tenor's mouth. His costume could have stench of urine. For God's sake don't pour yourself. Think: clear pond. Think: man at river's edge Who knows the difference Between desecration and redemption.