Michael S. Harper

1 Nose only above water; an hour in the ice melt; paw in a beaver trap, northern leaping through— the outlet sieving, setter- retriever staked to her trip, The stake of her young life run to nose level. Farmers adjacent to the lake call ’round for the owner; at least they call around, and a man in a pickup pulls her out, her crushed paw limp in the blazing sun. Shivering on our pantry floor, wrapped in a snowsuit, I see her dam the clamped paw staked to the sleeve, licking for breaks, a light trickle of blood spilling from a torn nail. 2 Next spring she will tramp down our wire, stamp on six goslings, swim for teal, run down blackbirds, drag deer bones in our garden. She limps on the compost pile, shakes at the vet, fishes under makeshift docks, ferrets out mink, frog, green snake, any animal scrimmage without stakes: listen to her spayed name— warned, thwarted, disregarded, beautiful— last of her line.

I place these numbed wrists to the pane watching white uniforms whisk over him in the tube-kept prison fear what they will do in experiment watch my gloved stickshifting gasolined hands breathe boxcar-information-please infirmary tubes distrusting white-pink mending paperthin silkened end hairs, distrusting tubes shrunk in his trunk-skincapped shaven head, in thighs distrusting-white-hands-picking-baboon-light on his son who will not make his second night of this wardstrewn intensive airpocket where his father's asthmatic hymns of night-train, train done gone his mother can only know that he has flown up into essential calm unseen corridor going boxscarred home,mamaborn, sweetsonchild gonedowntown into researchtestingwarehousebatteryacid mama-son-done-gone/me telling her 'nother train tonight, no music, no breathstroked heartbeat in my infinite distrust of them: and of my distrusting self white-doctor-who-breathed-for-him-all-night say it for two sons gone, say nightmare, say it loud panebreaking heartmadness: nightmare begins responsibility.

Peace is the active presence of Justice. The wrinkles on the brown face of the carrying case conform to the buttocks, on which the streaks of water from a five-gallon can dribble on the tailfront of the borrowed shirt he would wear if he could drain the pus from his swaddling bandages, striations of skin tunneling into the photograph. This is no simple mug shot of a runaway boy in a training film, Soweto's pummeled wire, though the turrets of light glisten in smoke, the soft coal hooding his platform entrance, dull and quiet. His father's miner's shoes stand in puddles of polish, the black soot baked into images of brittle torso, an inferno of bullets laid out in a letter bomb, the frontispiece of one sergeant- major blackening his mustache. On the drive to Evaton a blank pass away from Sharpeville where the freehold morgans were bought by a black bishop from Ontario, Canada, on a trek northward from the Cape in 1908, I speak to myself as the woman riding in the backseat talks of this day, her husband's death, twenty-three years ago, run over by an Afrikaner in the wrong passing lane; the passbook on the shoulder of the road leading to Evaton is not the one I have in my hand, and the photograph is not of my great- grandfather, who set sail for Philadelphia in the war year of 1916. He did not want a reception, his letters embarking on a platform at Queenstown where his eloquence struck two Zulu warriors pledged to die in the homelands because they could not spin their own gold. These threaded heads weigh down the ears in design of the warrior, Shaka, indifferent to the ruthless offerings over the dead bodies of his wives, childless in the campaigns with the British, who sit on the ships of the Indian Ocean each kraal shuddering near the borders; her lips turn in profile to the dust rising over a road where his house once stood; one could think of the women carrying firewood as an etching in remembrance to the silence, commencing at Sharpeville, but this is Evaton, where he would come from across the galleyship of spears turning in his robes to a bookmark; it is a good book, the picture of words in the gloss of a photograph, the burned image of the man who wears this image on the tongue of a child, who might hold my hand as we walk in late afternoon into the predestined sun. The press of wrinkles on the blanketed voice of the man who took the train from Johannesburg is flattened in Cape Town, and the history of this book is on a trestle where Gandhi worshipped in Natal, and the Zulu lullaby I cannot sing in Bantu is this song in the body of a passbook and the book passes into a shirt and the back that wears it.

He waltzes into the lane ’cross the free-throw line, fakes a drive, pivots, floats from the asphalt turf in an arc of black light, and sinks two into the chains. One on one he fakes down the main, passes into the free lane and hits the chains. A sniff in the fallen air— he stuffs it through the chains riding high: “traveling” someone calls— and he laughs, stepping to a silent beat, gliding as he sinks two into the chains.

When I stood behind his desk chair and when he sat, on rare occasions, on the porch, “sage of Anacostia,” they called him, I smelled his mane glorious, and as a hand saddle the aroma of hair took me to neckline and below. In Egypt, long after Napoleon had shot off the face of the Sphinx, I thought of this man, and the cusp of his palms on my shoulder blades; as always he was carrying the mail of gender, his touch immaculate in the true blend of the cortex, and of the complex, risen on a pulpit, and after the hot air, wintry parlance, the syllables of my name in his ear, when he touched me, as he had touched me then. I had my suspicions of English ladies, actresses, ghosts of the Thames, concubines, as we had been into this next century. And they had their wiles with him. I do not feel forbidden; the cameo ring he gave me, recession of his maleness all I need, and highlights of my dark profile, any children we might have had buried in architecture, and the hate of his daughter Rosetta, who I have spoken to over the grate. The sun rises and sets in our neighborhood: I WILL BURN THESE. But when I place my fingers in that mane it is to the saddle he will come.

When news came that your mother’d smashed her hip, both feet caught in rungs of the banquet table, our wedding rebroken on the memory of the long lake of silence when the stones of her body broke as an Irish fence of stones, I saw your wet dugs drag with the weight of our daughter in the quick of her sleep to another feeding; then the shoulders dropped their broken antenna branches of fear at the knife running the scars which had been born into the colon for the misspent enema, the clubbed liver unclean with the stones of the gall bladder, and the broken arch of hip lugging you to the lake, the dough inner tube of lading swollen with innerpatching. I pick you up from the floor of your ringing fears, the floor where the photographs you have worked into the cool sky of the gray you love, and you are back at the compost pile where the vegetables burn, or swim in the storm of your childhood, when your father egged you on with his open machinery, the exhaust choking your sisters, and your sisters choked still. Now this voice stops you in accusation, and the years pile up on themselves in the eggs of your stretched sons, one born on his birthday, both dead. I pull you off into the sanctuary of conciliation, of quiet tactics, the uttered question, the referral, which will quiet the condition you have seen in your mother’s shadow, the crutches inching in the uncut grass, and the worn body you will carry as your own birthmark of his scream.

for sandy and henry carlile Some great musicians got no place to play Above the freeway, over the music, we speak of the strategy of poems, bleeding wives who ulcerate our voices rhythming in the cut-heat Portland stink from the Willamette River; arteries of smog fixate this place in each recording, music, music, on Impulse. This little racist community has few friends; thousands of deerslayers hum into Beaverton, the one talk show driven out for their talk as the liberals dig in to KGO out of San Francisco; we troop toward the Lloyd Center for the ice-skating, the colorette bloomered dream merchants on rented skates, and the Sunday Chronicle near the big hotel. The poets, man and wife, write in the dimming air, their daughter in the toy rooms connecting them, the typewriter tacking the nails and snaps of her gown. This image of separation begins in adoption: her mother adopted out in San Jose; her father disowned, abandoned, torn out of the will; her name: Phoebe. And the sun does shine on them for this visit in squat pigeontoes, and this beach ball sings.

Soul and race are private dominions, memories and modal songs, a tenor blossoming, which would paint suffering a clear color but is not in this Victorian house without oil in zero degree weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind; it is all a well-knit family: a love supreme. Oak leaves pile up on walkway and steps, catholic as apples in a special mist of clear white children who love my children. I play “Alabama” on a warped record player skipping the scratches on your faces over the fibrous conical hairs of plastic under the wooden floors. Dreaming on a train from New York to Philly, you hand out six notes which become an anthem to our memories of you: oak, birch, maple, apple, cocoa, rubber. For this reason Martin is dead; for this reason Malcolm is dead; for this reason Coltrane is dead; in the eyes of my first son are the browns of these men and their music.

In 1915 my grandfather’s neighbors surrounded his house near the dayline he ran on the Hudson in Catskill, NY and thought they’d burn his family out in a movie they’d just seen and be rid of his kind: the death of a lone black family is the Birth of a Nation, or so they thought. His 5’4” waiter gait quenched the white jacket smile he’d brought back from watered polish of my father on the turning seats, and he asked his neighbors up on his thatched porch for the first blossom of fire that would bring him down. They went away, his nation, spittooning their torched necks in the shadows of the riverboat they’d seen, posse decomposing; and I see him on Sutter with white bag from your restaurant, challenged by his first grandson to a foot-race he will win in white clothes. I see him as he buys galoshes for his railed yard near Mineo’s metal shop, where roses jump as the el circles his house toward Brooklyn, where his rain fell; and I see cigar smoke in his eyes, chocolate Madison Square Garden chews he breaks on his set teeth, stitched up after cancer, the great white nation immovable as his weight wilts and he is on a porch that won’t hold my arms, or the legs of the race run forwards, or the film played backwards on his grandson’s eyes.

Whatever city or country road you two are on there are nettles, and the dark invisible elements cling to your skin though you do not cry and you do not scratch your arms at forty-five degree angles as the landing point of a swan in the Ohio, the Detroit River; at the Paradise Theatre you named the cellist with the fanatical fingers of the plumber, the exorcist, and though the gimmicky at wrist and kneecaps could lift the seance table, your voice was real in the gait and laughter of Uncle Henry, who could dance on either leg, wooden or real, to the sound of the troop train, megaphone, catching the fine pitch of a singer on the athletic fields of Virginia. At the Radisson Hotel, we once took a fine angel of the law to the convention center, and put her down as an egret in the subzero platform of a friend— this is Minneapolis, the movies are all of strangers, holding themselves in the delicacy of treading water, while they wait for the trumpet of the 20th Century Limited over the bluff or cranny. You two men like to confront. the craters of history and spillage, our natural infections of you innoculating blankets and fur, ethos of cadaver and sunflower. I hold the dogwood blossom, eat the pear, and watch the nettle swim up in the pools of the completed song of Leadbelly and Little Crow crooning the buffalo and horse to the changes and the bridge of a twelve-string guitar, the melody of “Irene”; this is really goodbye— I can see the precious stones of embolism and consumption on the platinum wires of the mouth: in the flowing rivers, in the public baths of Ohio and Michigan.