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Manatu, 2013

Daddy goes. Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating and trestle-jumping bare into rust-brackish water and cane-poling for bream and shallow-gigging too with a nail-pointy broomstick and creek-shrimping and cooler-dragging and coon-chasing and dove-dogging and duck-bagging and squirrel-tailing and tail-hankering and hard-cranking and -shifting and backfiring like a gun in his tittie-tan El Camino and parking it at The House of Ham and Dawn's Busy Hands and Betty's pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing double-wide and spine-leaning Vicki against her WIDE-GLIDE Pontiac and pumping for pay at Ray Wade's Esso and snuff-dipping and plug-sucking and tar-weeping pore-wise and LuckyStrike-smoking and Kool only sometimes and penny-pitching and dog-racing and bet-losing cocksuckmotherfuck and pool-shooting and bottle-shooting over behind Tas-T-O's Donuts and shootin' the shit and chewin' the fat and just jawin' who asked you and blank-blinking quick back at me and whose young are you no-how and hounddog-digging buried half-pints from the woods.

Applying to Heavy Equipment School I marched farther into the Great Plains And refused to come out. I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest. Around me in the fields, the hogs grunted And lay on their sides. You came with a little water and went away. The glass is still on the table, And the paper, And the burned scaffolds. * You were bent over the sink, washing your stockings. I came up behind you like the night sky behind the town. You stood frowning at your knuckles And did not speak. * At night I lie still, like Bolivia. My furnaces turn blue. My forests go dark. You are a low range of hills, a Paraguay. Now the clouds cover us both. It is raining and the movie houses are open.

for Desiray Kierra Chee In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet. The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit. In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it. Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace. Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep. Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger. Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear. We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names. Once we knew everything in this lush promise. What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav- ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood. An imperfect map will have to do, little one. The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another. There is no exit. The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge. You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way. They have never left us; we abandoned them for science. And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry. You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing. Fresh courage glimmers from planets. And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns. When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us. You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder. A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction. Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds. We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said. Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map.

Another dead mare waits in the shoals of some body of water, waits to be burden, borne into a foaming ocean, where it might become food for whales, or, simply empty signifier—hair latched to the sea’s undulation like Absalom’s beauty caught in the playful branches of a tree desiring union, entanglement, thick confusion— but not this mare; she does not get the luxury of a lyric—a song that makes our own undoing or killing sweet even as we go down into the fire to rise as smoke. This horse must lie, eyes open, amongst the stones and fresh water crawfish in Money, Mississippi, listen to the men’s boots break the water as they drop a black boy’s body near her head, pick him up, only to let him fall again there: bent and eye-to-eye with her as though decaying is something that requires a witness —as though the mare might say: on Tuesday after the rain fell, the boy’s neck finally snapped from the weight of the mill fan; he never looked at me again.

for Amadou Diallo The few strings snap and pull the doll’s flimsy limbs for his last ballet, an American piece, arms flung like a flamingo’s wings, his sashay a flame’s undulation, dip, wave, head snapped into a skygaze, a pained grin white beneath the doorway’s light, legs braiding in the climactic pirouette, convulsive shoulders rolling, the body’s final drift smooth as a sun-baked bloodflake flecked off a rhino’s horn, the gored corpse sweet meat to a smoky gauze of ravenous flies humming and blood- sucking tiny gunpowder-singed hearts, charred kiss marks, until, at last, the strings go slack, the doll sprawls in a crippled collapse, his face half lit, the puppeteers praising this black ghost’s steel-pierced, last dying quake, the dead sweet and clean, and that last wheeze, an escaping, you’ve heard it, drops the floodgates for the real ghosts, a bouqet of them, a blitzkrieg of black orchids roaring. And they blaze.

Light, so low upon earth, You send a flash to the sun. Here is the golden close of love, All my wooing is done. Oh, all the woods and the meadows, Woods, where we hid from the wet, Stiles where we stayed to be kind, Meadows in which we met! Light, so low in the vale You flash and lighten afar, For this is the golden morning of love, And you are his morning star. Flash, I am coming, I come, By meadow and stile and wood, Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, Into my heart and my blood! Heart, are you great enough For a love that never tires? O heart, are you great enough for love? I have heard of thorns and briers. Over the thorns and briers, Over the meadows and stiles, Over the world to the end of it Flash of a million miles.

marry at a hotel, annul ’em nary hep male rose sullen let alley roam, yell melon dull normal fellow hammers omelette divine sunrises Osiris’s irises his splendid mistress is his sis Isis creole cocoa loca crayon gumbo boca crayfish crayola jumbo mocha-cola warp maid fresh fetish coquettish a voyeur leers at X-rated reels

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history. * To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. * In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman. But there is no hangman, first she must create him, she must persuade this man at the end of the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her, this darkness, she must persuade him to renounce his face, exchange it for the impersonal mask of death, of official death which has eyes but no mouth, this mask of a dark leper. She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry? * You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal. * She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches through the wall, stroking and touching. What could she possibly have said that would have convinced him? He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history. * My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn’t have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe. This is not fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman and because of this some of them are unemployed. * He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple. She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, thighs, eyes, eyes. They both kept their promises. * The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he accidentally spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice. * Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare . * What did they say the first time they were alone together in the same room? What did he say when she had removed her veil and he could see that she was not a voice but a body and therefore finite? What did she say when she discovered that she had left one locked room for another? They talked of love, naturally, though that did not keep them busy forever. * The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it. At that time there were no female hangmen. Perhaps there have never been any, and thus no man could save his life by marriage. Though a woman could, according to the law. * He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife. She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood. They both kept their promises.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells And pretty maids all in a row.