Gregory Pardlo

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye; I was born across the river where I was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth, broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though it please you, through no fault of my own, pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells. I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden. I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion. I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air, air drifting like spirits and old windows. I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry; I was an index of first lines when I was born. I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was born with a prologue of references, pursued by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born. I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves; I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

We need a preacher who’ll say up in here instead of herein. Our vows should reference calla lilies and the snowy pistils they jab ardently at our faces. Let’s place their linty, foul-mouthed kiss at the center of satin table cloths white as bee boxes and us buzzing like the ichthyic insects we’ll invent: “coddle- fish” finning the air, murmuring for words beyond civil and ceremony, beyond moderation, all our senses under assault.

I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin to see the Broadway production of ARaisin in the Sun

He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec frequencies, he said. When the sun god liquors loose each ashen tongue the planet tattles. We are advised to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his dwindling fuse and the bartender would show him the door. In his honor I tune my form to the emanations of this vibrant life: Either someone's dropped a blue coin and I've picked up the murmur of its ribs—a quarter kiltering beneath the blond brick arcade of the whispering gallery at Grand Central—or someone's table is ready. No matter that I set my phone to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest. The man has passed. I got the text today, and now feel at least obliged to observe silence. Observe this café thick with humid bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam revealing patterns in the glassy chatter. For that he is a phantasm rumoring now a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel of a partial print. For that he is finally transcendent. For that we convened for drinks by some clockwork of urban chance each week, my year adrift in the East Village. For that I renounced him, and now regret having done so. For that I vibed with his passions—more, the deeper we reached in our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical record. I've traveled years through boot-black redactions of thought to find his apparition greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover the bed in which he slept and quested visions toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills, Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity. If you see something. What a fear of hobgoblins and philistines can blind our better senses. At the table beside me children play mosquito tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.

For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow, fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier? This is rhetorical. Like, "What to the Negro is the fourth of July?" A flag should be stitched with a fuse. Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland. I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not what you might guess), little sails and banners down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast. My wife's people are from San Salvador. They sent us with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment. Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke. Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power- washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed's trunks, the apocalyptic Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates's Flag from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no, like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny, texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost. Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts or strips of jerky. How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean, what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite? Gates's salute is a torch song, a rhythm of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme. I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire shut up in our bones.

The girls turning double-dutch bob & weave like boxers pulling punches, shadowing each other, sparring across the slack cord casting parabolas in the air. They whip quick as an infant’s pulse and the jumper, before she enters the winking, nods in time as if she has a notion to share, waiting her chance to speak. But she’s anticipating the upbeat like a bandleader counting off the tune they are about to swing into. The jumper stair-steps into mid-air as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity, training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment long enough to fit a second thought in, she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish as she flutter-floats into motion like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos thumbed alive. Once inside, the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch acquired Manhattan. How she dances patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing its travels in scale before the hive. How the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope slaps and scoops like a paddle boat. Her misted skin arranges the light with each adjustment and flex. Now heather- hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle, surfaces fracturing and reforming like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water. She makes jewelry of herself and garlands the ground with shadows.