Afaa Michael Weaver

after the painting by Brent Lynch The humid nights are best and worst, best because the birds sing at two in the morning when you cannot get back into the other world, worst because it is the moist heat that makes the skin supple, makes you want to rub against someone else, a woman, and there is nothing but the long list of lost chances, things you could have said, perhaps the simple question of will you sleep with me so that it is not just you and this shell of a home, this place where it feels the walls are another layer of my skin, and that is neither best or worst. It is the holding of the dead stink, the memories that was over him, holding them back. It is the utter singleness of being the only person here, the way the thoughts think themselves down to accepting that this is really just me here wondering who I am, just me here wondering why I am awake at two, which trigger it was, knowing all the time all too well the way the war of life is connected to the nervous system of the world, the ganglia of our shared horrors, either mine so large, or so people tell me, and here it seems to be the membrane between the skin of my bones and the skin of this home, the absorbing shock of space that gives when the memories burn their way in or out of me. I would lie here wondering how to tell her I am wrestling with the angel, wrestling with memories in the crevices and cracks of my body, of how I feel right now, what it felt like then, in those times, and I am glad she is not here, and I wish she were here, and she has no name because this is some woman I do not know. I practice in the silence of my thoughts the different pitch and rhythm of how I might ask will you sleep with me, afraid of what to say should she say yes and this decade of my monkish life should lie open and I have to say why I am sitting on the edge of the bed, why I have woke her from the sweet smile I assume she has when I assume her horror is smaller than mine.

In Los Angeles airport I sit stunned by the English, letters harsh things with no stories I know. The food smells dead, metal forks and knives set for making war against food. I am undone and done again, broken off from narratives of birth and being, of limits broken by the genius of slaves. I stand here where I was born, and the masks wait for me.

The one horse you gave me you took back when she went insane, when she began to chew wood instead of the expensive grain we bought from the feed store, the grain that had the sweet smell of molasses and was good for even us to chew. She turned into an ugly thing with her wild thoughts, and I forgot about the beauty expected of her when her blanket filled out and complemented her chestnut body and the name the Nez Percé gave her. She rotted and began to stink of promises gone wrong, of gods avenging their defilement. A man who knew what to do with useless horses came and took her away in a wooden trailer she tried to chew, and my tears welled up in huge drops before they splattered on the ground, as I trembled and realized I would have to give up her own ghost for her, ghost which she did not have, ghost which she came here beautifully without.

Calm appeared, his soul stopped, a crow staring as he snatched down miniature angels, trapped them in jars, capping the light away to make a hush out of glory songs, a crying out from the joyful aubades they breathe as easy as moonlight on jars of preserves, their throats full of fear now, the brave breast crumpled in his child fingers, their prisons invisible to the cherubim searching for heaven's missing songsters trapped in blind ways of getting even at a world that would make him small, make him an impotent wonder, curl his genius under like a witch's toes when his father died chewing on cheese and cornbread, chocolate surprise in the sun, an unkind ending. He grew in the way of genius, no charts showing where he ended and the world began, how cities figure in the jagged sweep of cornfields, endless thousands of shouts up into the evening, listening to the future speaking, like the old man in the schoolyard, a stranger by the wishing pond in the woods, or dogs that stand up like men in hats— these the Corinthian signs he mistook for an alphabet giving the right to molest children. Now wisdom is sour rubbing medicine pasted over nightmares, not the proper wealth of an old man, the arms of his neighbors around him like laurels.

The survey says all groups can make more money if they lose weight except black men...men of other colors and women of all colors have more gold, but black men are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales, meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love anymore, gone down inside earth somewhere where women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever, these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling, keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.