Jay Wright

Cigarettes in my mouth to puncture blisters in my brain. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My fingers soft, too soft to rattle rafters in second-rate halls. The harmonies I could never learn stick in Ayler's screams. An African chant chokes us. My image shot. If you look off over the Hudson, the dark cooperatives spit at the dinghies floating up the night. A young boy pisses on lovers rolling against each other under a trackless el. This could have been my town, with light strings that could stand a tempo. Now, it's the end of an ethnic dream. I've grown intellectual, go on accumulating furniture and books, damning literature, writing “for myself,” calculating the possibilities that someone will love me, or sleep with me. Eighteen-year-old girls come back from the Southern leers and make me cry. Here, there are coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun. Here, we shoot off every day to new horizons, coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun. It is the end of an ethnic dream. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My brain blistered.

Yo ave del agua floreciente duro en fiesta. —“Deseo de persistencia,” Poesía Náhuatl 1 In the region of rain and cloud, I live in shade, under the moss mat of days bruised purple with desire. My dominion is a song in the wide ring of water. There, I run to and fro, braiding the logical act in the birth of an Ear of Corn, polychromatic story I will now tell in the weaving, power's form in motion, a devotion to the unstressed. Once, I wreathed around a king, became a fishing net, a maze “a deadly wealth of robe.” Mothers who have heard me sing take heart; I always prick them into power. 2 Y vengo alzando al viento la roja flor de invierno. (I lift the red flower of winter into the wind.) —Poesía Náhuatl

En mi país el Otoño nace de una flor seca, de algunos pajaros; . . . o del vaho penetrante de ciertos rios de la llanura. —Molinari, “Oda a una larga tristeza” Each instant comes with a price, the blue-edged bill on the draft of a bird almost incarnadine, the shanked ochre of an inn that sits as still as the beavertail cactus it guards (the fine rose of that flower gone as bronze as sand), the river's chalky white insistence as it moves past the gray afternoon toward sunset. Autumn feels the chill of a late summer lit only by goldenrod and a misplaced strand of blackberries; deplores all such sleight of hand; turns sullen, selfish, envious, full of regret. Someone more adept would mute its voice. The spill of its truncated experience would shine less bravely and, out of the dust and dunghill of this existence (call it hope, in decline), as here the blue light of autumn falls, command what is left of exhilaration and fit this season's unfolding to the alphabet of turn and counterturn, all that implicit arc of a heart searching for a place to stand. Yet even that diminished voice can withstand the currying of its spirit. Here lies—not yet. If, and only if, the leafless rose he sees, or thinks he sees, flowered a moment ago, this endangered heart flows with the river that flees the plain, and listens with eye raised to the slow revelation of cloud, hoping to approve himself, or to admonish the rose for slight transgressions of the past, this the ecstatic ethos, a logic that seems set to reprove his facility with unsettling delight. Autumn might be only desire, a Twelfth Night gone awry, a gift almost too emphatic. Logic in a faithful light somehow appeases the rose, and stirs the hummingbird's vibrato. By moving, I can stand where the light eases me into the river's feathered arms, and, so, with the heat of my devotion, again prove devotion, if not this moment, pure, finite. Autumn cradles me with idiomatic certainty, leaves me nothing to disapprove. I now acknowledge this red moon, to requite the heart alone given power to recite its faith, what a cradled life finds emblematic.

Old now, your eyes nearly blank from plotting the light's movement over the years, you clean your Almanac and place it next to the heart of this letter. I have you in mind, giving a final brush and twist to the difficult pages, staring down the shape of the numbers as though you would find a flaw in their forms. Solid, these calculations verify your body on God's earth. At night, the stars submit themselves to the remembered way you turn them; the moon gloats under your attention. I, who know so little of stars, whose only acquaintance with the moon is to read a myth, or to listen to the surge of songs the women know, sit in your marvelous reading of all movement, of all relations. So you look into what we see yet cannot see, and shape and take a language to give form to one or the other, believing no form will escape, no movement appear, nor stop, without explanation, believing no reason is only reason, nor without reason. I read all of this into your task, all of this into the uneasy reproof of your letter. Surely, there must be a flaw. These perfect calculations fall apart. There are silences that no perfect number can retrieve, omissions no perfect line could catch. How could a man but challenge God's impartial distributions? How could a man sit among the free and ordered movements of stars, and waters, beasts and birds, each movement seen or accounted for, and not know God jealous, and not know that he himself must be? So you go over the pages again, looking for the one thing that will not reveal itself, judging what you have received, what you have shaped, believing it cannot be strange to the man you address. But you are strange to him —your skin, your tongue, the movement of your body, even your mysterious ways with stars. You argue here with the man and God, and know that no man can be right, and know that no God will argue right. Your letter turns on what the man knows, on what God, you think, would have us know. All stars will forever move under your gaze, truthfully, leading you from line to line, from number to number, from truth to truth, while the man will read your soul's desire, searcher, searching yourself, losing the relations.

In a morning coat, hands locked behind your back, you walk gravely along the lines in your head. These others stand with you, squinting the city into place, yet cannot see what you see, what you would see —a vision of these paths, laid out like a star, or like a body, the seed vibrating within itself, breaking into the open, dancing up to stop at the end of the universe. I say your vision goes as far as this, the egg of the world, where everything remains, and moves, holding what is most against it against itself, moving, as though it knew its end, against death. In that order, the smallest life, the small event take shape. Yes, even here at this point, Amma's plan consumes you, the prefigured man, Nommo, the son of God. I call you into this time, back to that spot and read these prefigurations into your mind, and know it could not be strange to you to stand in the dark and emptiness of a city not your vision alone. Now, I have searched the texts and forms of cities that burned, that decayed, or gave their children away, have been picking at my skin, watching my hand move, feeling the weight and shuttle of my body, listening with an ear as large as God's to catch some familiar tone in my voice. Now, I am here in your city, trying to find that spot where the vibration starts. There must be some mistake. Over the earth, in an open space, you and I step to the time of another ceremony. These people, changed, but still ours, shake another myth from that egg. Some will tell you that beginnings are only possible here, that only the clamor of these drums could bring our God to earth. A city, like a life, must be made in purity. So they call you, knowing you are intimate with stars, to create this city, this body. So they call you, knowing you must purge the ground. “Sir, suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms and tyranny of the British crown were exerted, with every powerful effort in order to reduce you to a state of servitude: look back, I entreat you, on the variety of dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that time, in which every human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential preservation; you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and tranquility which you enjoy you have mercifully received, and that it is the peculiar blessing of Heaven.”