Chris Abani

The telephone never rings. Still you pick it up, smile into the static, the breath of those you’ve loved; long dead. The leaf you pick from the fall rises and dips away with every ridge. Fingers stiff from time, you trace. Staring off into a distance limned by cataracts and other collected debris, you have forgotten none of the long-ago joy of an ice-cream truck and its summer song. Between the paving stones; between tea, a cup, and the sound of you pouring; between the time you woke that morning and the time when the letter came, a tired sorrow: like an old flagellant able only to tease with a weak sting. Riding the elevator all day, floor after floor after floor, each stop some small victory whittled from the hard stone of death, you smile. They used to write epics about moments like this.

But of course these poems are about men, which we become by defining how we are not women and so becoming a shadow devouring the light to find the limits which is what Richard Pryor would have told Joan of Arc in a joke funnier for being sexist “It’s a man thang.” And of course there is God and its problematic relationship to light not to mention the question of permission Who builds the box, the shape? It makes sense that Jesus, the new man 2,000 years ago was a carpenter. You need that craft, the precision of measurement angles of angels who incidentally are never women. Just ask the Romans, who called them Angelo, Angelus never Angela— that lie was coined by a dissident nun hiding her feminism under the cover of rapture but is it enough to announce yourself? To beat your chest in contrition calling Mea culpa! Mea culpa? Guilt can never be enough Mere intent—where is its purpose? Yet there are no answers there are only lines that disappear into horizons that girder us with safety just as there is no way to end this poem.

The body is a nation I have not known. The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that. Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin- covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark. Like that. “The body is a savage,” I said. For years I said that: the body is a savage. As if this safety of the mind were virtue not cowardice. For years I have snubbed the dark rub of it, said, “I am better, Lord, I am better,” but sometimes, in an unguarded moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat and the screaming grass. But this distance I keep is not divine, for what was Christ if not God’s desire to smell his own armpit? And when I see him, I know he will smile, fingers glued to his nose, and say, “Next time I will send you a down as a dog to taste this pure hunger.”

my mother put down her knife and fork, pulled her wedding ring from its groove, placing it contemplatively on her middle finger. So natural was the move, so tender, I almost didn’t notice. Five years, she said, five years, once a week, I wrote a letter to your father. And waited until time was like ash on my tongue. Not one letter back, not a single note. She sighed, smiling, the weight gone. This prime rib is really tender, isn’t it? she asked.

There are stones even here worn into a malevolence by time gritting the teeth and tearing the eyes with the memory. Out in the desert, the wind is a sculptor working the ephemera of sand. Desperately editing steles to write the names of thousands of slaves who died to make Pharaoh great. It is a fool’s game. And we are like the blind musician at the hotel who tells us with a smile: I’ll see you later. The guard at the pyramid eyes me. Are you Egyptian? he demands, then searches my bag for a bomb. At the hotel they speak Arabic to me, don’t treat me like the white guests, and I guess, even here, with all the hindsight of history we haven’t learned to love ourselves. I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot explain why. How do you say: In my country they buried me alive for six months? And so you lie and tell yourself this is love. I am protecting the world from my rage. Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa. Do you have a knife? Do you have one? the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me, searching us. We call this on ourselves. We are clearly political criminals. I trace the glyphs chipped into stone. As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could I too would carve myself into eternity. Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me you’ve found a spelling mistake in it! A line of miniature statues is placed into the tomb to serve the pharaoh. One for each day of the year. Four hundred. The overseers are a plus. I think even death will not ease the lot of the poor here. Statues: it seems the more I search the world for differences the more I find it all the same. Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too when he said we are all one. Mona argues about who should pay to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists. A woman nearby tells her husand she can see dead bodies at work. Why pay? Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask. That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees. From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops spread out like a conference of coffee tables. Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs like family secrets sunning themselves. Two white goats on a roof chew their way through the debris. On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me she wants to be Celine Dion. She is my sister calling me home to Egypt. Perhaps one day I will be ready. For now it is enough to know I can be at home here.

Metal giraffes march up the bluff toward the lighthouse. In the moonlight, whales, or their ghosts, litter the sand. There is a museum by the park that houses apartheid; contained in stiff wax dummies. The tour bus stops on the road’s edge. On the right a black town, the left Indian. Pointing he says: This is the racial divide. Stopping at the bar, the drink menu offers— Red’s Divas only five rand each. Each night the pounding sea reminds me that, here, women are older than God. These people carry their dead with them, plastering them onto every met face. Yet love hums like turning forks and the fading spreading sound is the growth of something more. Their absence is loud and I long for the confetti flutter of butterflies. Abattoirs litter the landscape with the sinister air of murder, signs proclaiming:Zumba Butchery, as though this is where the Zumba’s blood- lust got the better of them. The air conditioner in my room hums a dirge to a sea too busy spreading rumors. Death skips between street children playing hopscotch in the traffic. The woman singing in Zulu, in a Jamaican bar, is calling down fire, calling down fire. There is no contradiction.

It’s like flying in your dreams, she said. You empty Yourself out and just lift off. Soar. It’s like that. * Red.               Red.                Red. Just that word. Sometimes. * Yang & Yin. Like twins tumbling through summer. He, the rooster crowing sun; desperate—afraid— As only men can be. And Yin? Let’s say she has long hair— No, that won’t work. If we are to believe the ancient Chinese, she was a dog howling moon. * When I counted out the pills, it was a slowing down. Like the delay between when the car goes through the dip and your stomach falls away— And won’t stop. * Of course it was because she didn’t fit my mold. So I punished her. And why? And why? And why? You did it, I said. You did it. Wouldn’t fill my world. * And eventually we all kill our mothers. Their eyes a tenderness that doesn’t flinch from it. Knowing. Eventually. * What else is there? * Paula’s paintings are real. The women thick, visceral, like stubborn cliffs the sea cannot contain—or drown. * Or dogs. And such as these drove Homer to despair— And his cry: Oh to see! To see! To see! * So Paula says: To be a dog woman is bestial is good. Eating, snarling. Utterly believable. Gross. * Like when Cesaria Evora breaks your heart with a smile all melancholy and sea and salt. Assim ’m ta pidi mar Pa ’l leva ’me pa ’me ca voeta And it doesn’t matter that you don’t know what the words mean. Some things are beyond that. * So. Tanya bought the record because Cesaria’s face is beautiful with all the lost love of the world and darker than the blue of the sun setting over the Atlantic. * It’s in the angle of light washing her hair with sun into a puddle that catches in the throat The wood deck creaks from the weight of all that air and sun and silence Water chuckling in the tiny fountain in the corner holding up the song of wind chimes and flies And it’s all here. Fire. Water. Stone. Wood. * All caught up in Yeats and the cuckoo that wasn’t a real bird but cried with all the agony of the desire for flight hemmed by wooden wings, and springs and cogs. I think. * Or looking for Rilke— How the panther is like the rage of a doll’s soul caught in the body: but to say: under an open window, a violin Accomplishment though is another matter— Just ask Baudelaire and so I thought I could do it. Necromancer, necromancer, necromancer make me a mate only one of my ribs pray take. So why won’t women fit into that space? * Is that why in the photograph David plays an inflatable lyre? Does his smile make it all artifice? * But life is this and it will not be contained. The Igbo say: No one can outrun their shadow. And this is good. This is hope. Because, or maybe, we cannot outrun love. * To drive down a road, she said. Until it stops at the edge of the sea. An ocean vast and immense, she said. If you are lucky, she said. It fills you.

It was the hornbill that spoke it. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new How does the darkness hide? In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new The sun is no bigger than a crab. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new Hot soup is devoured from the edges. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new The blood sign is red; burning like fire. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new It has no name; silence is its name. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new.

I Africans in the hold fold themselves to make room for hope. In the afternoon’s ferocity, tar, grouting the planks like the glue of family, melts to the run of a child’s licorice stick. Wet decks crack, testing the wood’s mettle. Distilled from evaporating brine, salt dusts the floor, tickling with the measure into time and the thirst trapped below. II The captain’s new cargo of Igbos disturbs him. They stand, computing the swim back to land. Haitians still say:Igbo pend’c or’ a ya! But we do not hang ourselves in cowardice. III Sold six times on the journey to the coast, once for a gun, then cloth, then iron manilas, her pride was masticated like husks of chewing sticks, spat from morning-rank mouths. Breaking loose, edge of handcuffs held high like the blade of a vengeful axe, she runs across the salt scratch of deck, pain deeper than the blue inside a flame. IV The sound, like the break of bone could have been the Captain’s skull or the musket shot dropping her over the side, her chains wrapped around his neck in dance.