Angela Jackson

In the ocean one fish swallows the other: a geometric progression of loss. You are bigger than I. The calamity of love swelling out larger than us. And what destiny partakes of our dilemma? Swallows the cause and effect: eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged parts wanting to breathe and wanting. There is no gentle sense to this. Is there? Only a kind of terror at the chain of events, the scale of loss, the ordered destruction one against the other— all that something larger awaits its moment.

Some places you could die in, if you could just go on living there. The boy, his legs bare and small, swinging in the stroller, sockless, suede-shoed feet touching the runner. He can walk, but the woman keeps him from running into the street. He won’t obey but listens to everything we say. Head tilted, face changing with the conversation. Green leaves leap through fences. Cars wait while we cross. And each bird the boy greets with its name, “Bird,” flies away. The sky holds everything. The woman pushes her son’s son along. Her arms strong enough to hold nine strong horses prancing. She’s given her money away because someone had to bury a child. That is the worst thing. A mother burying her child. I would never do that to her, even though it means what it means. A thousand years from now when I am only a dream I will dream this dream of strolling. Perhaps I am doing so now.

with respect to Zora and the Ground of the African Church Sorrowtalked eye-to-eye forgiven is no mere burden. The one who sings is no mere beast. The one who slips the harness of the horror stands alive as earth. Today I can watch the wind and it is blue smoke. I shake myself inside my dress, consider rain and choose Shine. I was walking down Mississippi River Street and a ghost stopped me. No one could see it but me, standing in the middle of the sidewalk smilin at a haint with his hat in his hand instead of his head when he can tote that too. When one mule die the rest neigh-cry till the wagon take the dead thing away. Mississippi River Street rampant with noise, radiant, won’t hold still. But I have walked on blue black water. Watched dead rise before the wagon came. Everywhere I see mules, open mouths sing blues, then be human, then beyond. Funerals, weddings, baptisms I take off my skin, hang it up like a soaked quilt to dry the tears and sweat from feeling. I stand naked before Church, holding Dr. Watts closer than my sagging, girlish breasts. My soul wears no clothes when she sing. It is all being in love with more than one man who is one whole man you can look into his eyes without blinking. Where would I go to hide? Dr. Watts standing with my skin hooked on his finger and I am next to him solid and living the song with no words     . that every born-again mule knew in death and in life before birth, now hums true again hot in the chest and throat breaking natural out the mouth like breathing. Where would I go to hide? Sit down, rock my soul like my baby and Dr. Watts climb in my lap and moan for the milk no mother can buy or borrow only make in hearts of her eyes, in lines of the palms of her hands. And where would I find lines with no skin? Where would I go to hide? I tell you I am living now. Like in Mississippi Grandmama’s bedroom sitting on the high bed you could break your neck leaving. Cousin Chubby said fried fish, greens, and cornbread was good eatin. I am good livin. Blue smoke watching, naked, haint-smiling, entertaining Dr. Watts, dreaming of a man with a white liver who can’t kill me, who love mulish women, hainted ones, I am the sainted one naked with no sense of memory but good like God rocking hums in my lap and looking for no hiding place even if wind be blue smoke hurricane and I make red milk in the hearts of my eyes and reach out my lifelines to a hopeless haint I can stand myself. Naked now, where would I want to go to hide? From this funeral wedding death and birth baptism the sliding tears washing my soul cleaner than Dr. Watts’ whistle or the look in a sweatin man’s eyes when he lookin at a perfect, brutal sun killing him with living while he lick his lips and dream of water, then put his shoulder behind a woman guiding him while he dig in and groove the earth to the quick deep endless quick. Where would I go Where would I go to hide this yes-crying love yielding beyond flesh yet subsumed by sweat Where would I go naked so following blues and Dr. Watts like a double-seeing shadow standing before you with only blue smoke between us humming yes and yes and yes subsumed by sweat and yielding beyond mere flesh.

That day in December I sat down by Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I was myriad-weary. Feets swole from sewing seams on a filthy fabric; tired-sore a pedalin’ the rusty Singer; dingy cotton thread jammed in the eye. All lifelong I’d slide through century-reams loathsome with tears. Dreaming my own silk-self. It was not like they all say. Miss Liberty Muffet she didn’t jump at the sight of me. Not exactly. They hauled me away—a thousand kicking legs pinned down. The rest of me I tell you—a cloud. Beautiful trouble on the dead December horizon. Come to sit in judgment. How many miles as the Jim Crow flies? Over oceans and some. I rumbled. They couldn’t hold me down. Long. No. My feets were tired. My eyes were sore. My heart was raw from hemming dirty edges of Miss L. Muffet’s garment. I rode again. A thousand bloody miles after the Crow flies that day in December long remembered when I sat down beside Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I said—like the joke say—What’s in the bowl, Thief? I said—That’s your curse. I said—This my way. She slipped her frock, disembarked, settled in the suburbs, deaf, mute, lewd, and blind. The bowl she left behind. The empty bowl mine. The spoiled dress. Jim Crow dies and ravens come with crumbs. They say—Eat and be satisfied. I fast and pray and ride.

On the other end of the line he sounds like my brother but is my father telling me about Coony who is fat. His whole body like a stomach round all round, fat even on his head. Eighty and heavy. How he joked Coony about his weight, joking him about a tow truck he’d need to haul him out of the tub like an old sunken ship pulled out of the gulf of blues, leaving whirlpools in the porcelain. “Quit all that eating and drinking,” my daddy say he said to him. “Quit pointing in that garden and reach down to get it.” My daddy say he joked him, ribbed him good. (And I know my daddy laughed gap-toothed, his mouth, throat, chest, and gut wide open for the signifying jest. His gray hair striking back time.) He sounds like my brother when he was a little boy, digging in the encyclopedia for the cause of something obscure, occult, trying to figure out how old Coony slipped in the bathtub that was always there and died like that. Baby Sister called to tell it first and she wasn’t joking after all like my daddy thought she was, Death a sad trick children pull. On the other end of the line my father sounds like my brother now. I know how Dying, bitter or tender, is the dark water that keeps us young. And this gulf of blues, deep and shiny, the only place to be between Time and Eternity.

In the redcoat she (who is I) was an angel, dark and bright. Mama chose the drama: pretty scarlet to subdue the white walk, a world dumb with snow, patentleather shoes to shine the path over ice. My father paid the way. His teeth salt inside the grin. I (who’s she) had a manner of leaping toward a light suddenly running into ecstasy or heat, exquisitely blind in the body racing inside it- self. A little fit of imagining. Thin arms, cropped wings, to hold the bristly branches of fir, and sing- ing, sisters and brothers itching, happy from angelhair fine as a strand of cat hair split six ways and brushed into the skin to itch and itch again. We were wild and giddy with gifts. It was then and always as all souls itch and spin in lit-red coats that float down this narrow vein, so we spin in O, to someone who loves us and suffers the world for each turn before a mirror, quiet as ice, we fall all through at last here in memory’s tiny Paradise.

for Jerry Ward I am the only one here. I stand in my one place and I can see a good piece down the road. I am yonder, further than the chunk of your stone. Right now, directly, I am persimmon falling free and the prisoner opening up in me. Don’t come through my door and want to run my house. I am the angel who sweep air in and out my own dancing body. I got good eyes. I can see. A good piece down the road. Clear to God murmuring in me. My head is the burning bush. What I hold in my hand is the promised land. I set my people free in me. And we walk without wandering like people named after mere plants, because we are tree and high-stepping roots cake-walking in this promised place. Where I go is where I am now. Don’t mess with me: you hurt yourself. In the middle of my stride now. I am walking yes indeed I am walking through my own house. I am walking yes indeed on my own piece of road. Toting my own load and yours and mine. I tell you I feel fine and clear this morning even when it’s night and a full moon with my thumbprint on it. Everything is clamorous and quiet. I am the only One here. And we don’t break. No indeed. Come hell and high water. We don’t break for nothing.