Ed Roberson

1 . MORNING The year and its as like as eggs, the days in their crates of season we break open and the yolk of fresh sun we scramble the runny light into a firm break of the night's winter helping of the fast. * Yellow dishes— forsythia set out for the early meal of season— sit the house    yards the town parks    down together to this spring as to a table all set in order    just So good to see you and your way found back.                      * The arriving coats of smell are hung in the air, butt-smacked and oiled babies of moment; and years of taste as touch hug    the senses to the living; sweet sour bitter salty some never experienced again, the gloved fingers of bananas    so briefly kissed with ripeness; fruit, grip-shaped thought brought to the tongue, the finished taste of words,    an aftertaste of silence,    the morning glories we haven't tasted yet                      * life, as lasting as any one sense, a taste a sight, an orange mix of kiss with sweetness for the moment it exists, finishes and is swallowed, is also those who finish hungry or starve to death    which swallows; the final stage of rattlesnake bite is yellow vision, light,    then you both go out. Fear, to the tongue, is metallic: I tasted a copper penny    it could have been a one-time and final, incomparable —How does life taste to one condemned in that cup    this morning?—

I have to leave early in the dark and hungry to avoid crossing the snow as the noon burns the crust into an un-servable lake slush instead of the crisp bridge that would be in order to get me over the ridge My journal is already laundered clean of my words and my instructions have dissolved into a white mash a washed bone ball rolled into itself of all I have in the world in my pocket The ink is thin the paper is poor my eyes balance on the pale words around which a stream flows almost erasing the way across the idea Shadows the black flowers of the light self -sowing through the trees dark gardens of midnight for the gray-white morning hour of blindness in print miles before I am to arrive here To approach the waiting milestone dims whatever else of its lantern ‘til only the placed light there is on me. In this light barely but used to it I can make out the staggered columns of my account as if back through weren’t the real distance: the thin chest flag pinned on by each ridge the titled introduction taking your coat each storm. My letters and ribbons have been the natural— strengths on their way to the more— natural weaknesses— and loss. yet— I wonder where I thought I was going— to ’ ve done what you must pass examinations for before I took any.

To Iretha A textbook photograph most likely led me to think the Rosetta Stone the size of a library’s old Webster’s Third Edition or two loaves of bread on a side board, but here it stands, three tongues, or one mind that can say three ways we say the one thing, the breaths and sights of each way in rock, a milestone in intangibles between them. Reflected light from outside through the entrance, duplicating on the glass case      the door image that the stone itself is       opens when you walk around behind it exhibit the inhibition of letters, and I see you, not a translation, step through from beyond all description into the calling of flesh in black skin: beauty. Beauty. Beauty.

1. He turned so fast he wound the spirals of his arms tight into a slap in the face he beat himself to death dancing he would fall then get right — back up to some music he heard all by himself no one to help listen 2.Program We tune taking in hand the remote as partner to the news. We turn twirling the tit of the dial      in touch to touch between our fingers. We feel ourselves both touch and button coming on. Or is it music we two pick up step to      that times happening into receiving line? 3. table. . . Tied to a table top      the table tilted up right so he hung by his ankles, he filled from a bucket on the floor at his head the cup at his feet overhead      with a spoon, and when it filled, then an attendant emptied cup back into bucket, and he began again doing the senseless       hanging sit ups like prayer   in the morning naked, his throat cut draining the words into the bucket from which he delivered the blood of his songs into the cup of heaven, his feet, in steps 4.By The Rivers of. . The boys came in the house home from day camp that summer they were stopped so many feet into their running through the door made to meet the guests required of        to sing what they had done today They sang of being taught though they thought they knew already how to swim Asked if they liked it the youngest explained that what he liked the best was to come in through the top door of the water into the city underneath the pool      He said he saw long lights he liked      people made funny faces and were flying. I am the guest      I come in through the top door of the water 4 to 12   for the public aquarium I'm a diver tankman to porpoises, moray eels, the lightning cloud of neon tetras at my hand I midwife the anaconda — all 60 plastic wrap egg babies — making a living living in a vision city of living cubes of water door to door. Door to door tank displays on my shift don't get visited by out of tank appearances in their own likeness hiding gifts of transcendence and wisdom Rather than glory — tubes and cylinders trailing old air   poor disguise flippers for wings and gifts no more than of care and feeding. Though I'm trained to their pH's and oxygen levels this is a lay practice of my own care and feeding      They live in a timeless solution of their histories the living broth of their other lives, their dead, their brothers      I find something familial familiar in these small squares these boxes buried in the public air of the aquarium, the slave atlantic's water, blocked each into a plot water is one with its everywhere: the how many lost of the all of us brought here — in my wandering going in door to door into the gathered ecologies keeping a watch out for the shark, in what I bring     in this extra grace said      from some black thing to this fare — get their care and feeding as if some hour in all employment living to give it goes to their loss where without that sorry new york minute's pause at ourselves in this country       we lose our colors        the gray side of money that pale of ghosts flying   folds on our chests, and we float up fattened by work that is emptied of the gain back of our lives. They come from in between things through      as though between things shines a door   we sing of the orisha I hear a singing on the other side of a door singing going on behind the tanks heard on the public floor people invisibly at work on public display their aquarium      parading the corps we've decorated as gods      thousands of years unseen that morning we woke when we had lost the attempt all our supplies everything but our lives      washed down the river            left in a puddle a fish we only had to dish up out of its own carapace      a shelled catfish Plecostomus and here it was I see now      recognize one of my samples I care for in this exhibit all that kept me alive 'til we reached a village. Come back in from my own expeditions out      I know the diving aboard landing of the plane made into the glittering night waters that are the city      home searching the long waving light refraction for its drawing of that African's face. But the boys             they'll grow up in what only is a difference in this country      as if starting the exhibit at a different door changed the subject: their mother white like many's somewhere in our people here, their African black like a many's in our American   peoples) father came over long after the middle passage on a plane to school A whole new subject here. But we sit down to Miles to Louis Armstrong over dinner and later a little Lou Donaldson gets us dancing      our stuff. 5.seat The erased unshined polish of a board that is a mind unmet nor chaired into a seat of any solving, gray with no answers the slate smoothness of the cities' street education That moving standing still we learn that rest is hanging on      no seat keeping the strap and loop's flow open from around your neck your foot out of the trap The loss of grace complaint forgets we find footing accomplishment in that 6.Dance, for the Balance of New Mexico We had driven until the land rover was in danger of never being upright again at this height. The cloud came through the window on the driver side and out the passenger and stopped, its center on the seat between. To go further would have been to carry black clown from Second Mesa's Butterfly Dance, his foggy, white stripes      floating ash across the blackened rocks naked from a fire        his hardened body We could hear the land rover strain,   his screaming laughter just before he'd leap through a complete standing somersault, and we would halt and float the truck for that moment he was air in a sweated cloud of fear until he touched the balance to the ground and put us down. 7.Flamenco Goyasques We all have women we were born of We all were dragged out & lined up against the sky Know that Somebody here stood beside you You put up your hands & you die . . . . . . . . . . . . Just in . . . Just in word. Word of navigational challenges

To Reg 1season opener The ants are licking open the peonies unwrapping the seal to the tight globes of bloom    they gang up on and chase away a ladybug I can sit here    on the porch stoop as on the step    of an amphitheater and watch    ours is a great sports city the tour guides say   even the house roofs are bleachers    some ball is always in the air ready to open    its colors fragrance like stadium food scent reaches the street    our mouths drop open    tongues about to do the work 2 The wind is so high, the lake surface contracts in a gasp The waves jump straight up. Our side must be winning. I can't hear the crowd of whitecap I see from the bus run The joggers and cyclists look as though hysterically they carry, themselves,     the news and breaking sound        that maybe There's not another side to water        nor to the whole of what we play We field against a fog, or, the home game in solids, ice in a change of uniform We contend against what is and is ourselves        though We want a side that isn't ours to have of the universe    to have us on our feet like the waves cheering on this morning this morning We want our messengers to lie    a pool of good news dead silent at our feet for us to walk open.    Our winnings winning or not: still won a life that lets us live it the excitement    of winged ankles, seas of dancing streets in the envelope. 3 When the waves jumped straight up, the messenger Sand smashed them to pieces for winning When the surface fainted back, the stampeding Sky sank its foot in that face to leave winning There were two countless words for the score You hear the roar of silence over winning Someone screaming, What are you doing, what are you Doing    Something answers, I am winning. Doing nothing is thrown out the window To eliminate that way to deal with winning We burned gridlocked cars in Morse code before We took off running to say living is winning Lake Shore Drive reads Chicago is 'living life city' (quoting the song)          winning. 4 The whole street     ladies lay afloat in the gondola stroll     of their own legs the daylit lanterns of their dreams hide inexpressibly their faces made up with not being in Kansas they fan with maps like feathers of brightly colored directions to famous brands of which this street is that one direction.     And all one direction only—         no movement. as if, since people move, there are no people on this street; the stalks of the buildings, reeds a hem of the lake sweeps through. 5 daylight you see people's reflections off each other fill the street cascading one from another the crowd slips like a fan out of itself, in the angling of store displays the glass facets kaleidoscope a rose window back of themselves full of the flash petals of grace that fall by evening home, when the ones dressed in evening wear        possession-less and so, without reflection here        take all the empties back all the want and people scavenged back off the streets     into these who dine with starving    off the streets 6 The street in the opening between buildings is running a strip of the el like a frame by frame tape, the windows of the train different shots of the sky, then it breaks, and the clouds are caught up in the walls of nearby glass-skin architecture. I never get to see what I think would be the whole movie. I, too, move on. The turns in the drive roll the buildings out from behind one another in a scenery change, only I am the one on wheels, the drop backs a larger stage than this town. And just as I can see betrayal coming by the music, my eyes braille the thunder hidden even up the sleeve of a silent film. The hand shakes anyway. Not meant to be the end of things. An inbound train toward the loop will be arriving shortly. The street in the opening 7 The John Hancock Building has never struck the actual oil it looks like it should. Wildcatters call this a dry hole. But it isn't, it has the pool of Lake Michigan on the bottom when you're looking from the top What an amazing hole, he said. Enchantment's name to call into      what we all are looking for, a spell to an opening as deep     into seeing. He had the gift of new    first time in a city, pick pockets hadn't sighted yet the eyes, the bulging wealth of openness, the shiny change. We were watching the old movie of our century. —our village root, the well's drawn-words drip into volumes in our pack trying to solve our plot. A close-up on the winch-rope, frayed by so continuously raising the question, cuts off    not to mislead the viewer; and screened on our bodies, the billboard buses, city wall— the crude that is this day struck from our drilling 8 All over everything    the sun rises funny. I heard the eagle flies on Friday as the eagle shits on Friday where I lived. Not enough for any growth to get paid its flowers. Mostly weed. Bouquet of distraction. Broken glass season gives way to plastic in the lots, only the packaging changes, it snows something or other year round white to deal with, powder or rock. Or through the window, the country unable to stop opening its poverties, making the sun go 'round to the back. But the sun reserves its someday someday to shine where door don' 'llow light. And I am drenched by a slow, barely brought in gusher of my working through the cracks, a gold opened in myself like a vein through blinding pain, through the names of need and silence. But my someday come seems didn't when the hit is only mine, not also enough of  to my brothers. 9 Dawn burnished wave,        smoothed free of everything but the slowest curve barely less than earth's hump      unloads a surf-less silence we can see— clear bright yet shimmering—stillness as. Stillness as a dangerous surface enough! a floor walked all night clear to the end of nowhere                     got to get my hands on some no place          except where money from somewhere to get me over this hump an arm swipes everything off the table to this floor        the hit bottom come to the surface on the table

Mourning doves are not owls after a while away from the city      not because the country appears of a softer feather       less predatory you're thinking a sound more naturally friendly less edgy and dangerous than the subway but because the city city to city within itself so sharply details for you   actually walks you through a training in the amplitudes of form after a while that sharpness wipes the smile the natural had you putting on everything. Really owls       are so soft       their deadly accuracy of flight depending on it they are all but silent      a recognizable law nobody says shit you learn       the city has taught you to  pick up on     which wings bring the disk of their sun for around your neck each day and which take you out; and that your green act of good is natural in that it too depends on the weather.

May I ask you who your grandmother died Her blackness you pretended we’d assume a servant’s      in the photograph May I ask did she die herself? I know you all light under an umbrella     don’t tan and she could be seen as she had been made too dark for what the son do. I saw her years ago after she died And again today in the market I asked her     I had to know if she was who I knew    ... “Only two things you really has to— tha’s to stay black and die.” Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretend that you have died except you’re black and alive who are you? She is as hundreds of years old as the stories of the lies of grandmothers in the cellar    ... May I ask who your grandmother      died if she died herself?

But for a low bank of cloud, clear morning, empty sky. The bright band of light beneath the cloud’s gray I thought at first was open distance, but it’s ice that by extension raised the lake above the lip of blue lake and spilled it farther out than that horizon along the sky and floods the clouds. Seeing the distant level further unfurl into the sky says not to trust blue line as terminus when a meniscus of ice can ride up that wall of the skyline, a measure of illusion how close the eye can be to filled with seeing, to widen instead the tube of that measure of sight we are given. There is the larger lake the wider look we open eyes to see. That glance of the lip put in a bigger cylinder falls away, but how much deeper the spring to fill the cup. As if the surface we are seeing drops the more seeing is added, while we feel the stories well as our height from which to see. And watch the dawns coming. …I seem to be emptying of time the more time I put in, and see like a man with weathered eyes enough to face to face up to the sight’s field expanded to insight. To the dark the lake can turn and curl up like a map for poems to have these likenesses to graph, then come un-scrolled from semblance back to just this lake. Water cities are led to layout beside. But never in stillness; always the restoration to change, from ice, from cloud, turning to clear liquid—as is most of our body water— thinned sheet, layer that if written on or with, a bearing a name chiseled on water disappears.

I expected something up out of the water not the shadow in the wave that rose to fill the wave then splash a breath off the abutting air      then disappear. I didn't see any of this         only the dark wave.         Even the size of a whale I don't see        what I look directly at. I didn't see the pronghorn antelope, speed they pointed out equal our car's, but never having seen distance so large I couldn't pin in it      point to antler and saw in parallax instead       the world entire a still brown arc of leap      so like a first look at the milky way       each stone a star I saw but could not see. I didn't see the Nazca earth drawings looking at a line like a path      the vision on it   my not looking up. & trying to see from on the ground looking from a plane thousands of feet above maybe I saw only what the unenlightened marking out the lines could see from there because I never saw the figures until shown from books. I've told folk half the truth      that I was there I was but embarrassed      never told      I missed my chance until I saw:       without embarrassment this country miss its chance   looking at color and not see what it looked directly at, without embarrassment act      and not see that done on its own hands      not see its own bright blood.

given to look into    the bowl of sky for it to fill with future see it turned upside down on the grass see the ladle pass hear the god underneath calling his inside the heavenly vault    eternal how that bump reminds me    how we saw it once from the underside of Nut    a mother's belly see dissolve against her vast ground the drowned cloud of black lives    the solution's population of rain crowding the city in the belly see it now as the sea extended the drowned city     lit     in this sky see our sky the bone clouds casting African tomorrows   only an arm    black balletic cloud extends itself dark nimbic invertebrate squall I am handed rain by a portuguese man-o-war These are new skies once we absorb the seas' solution as the bodies lost the sting fire of lightning    flesh the water body air we drown together in our living to drink from this bone