Rickey Laurentiis

New Orleans, Louisiana For the drowning, yes, there is always panic. Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out a need to know. You only feel you need to live. That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest fills with a strange new air, you will not ask what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth, but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb that keeps it kicking. Let it.

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’s black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped, his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away. If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her; if not for that Native woman’s quick intelligence, out-climbing

We aren’t the solid men. We bend like the number seven. Dig at corners, eat cobwebs, we are barefoot and bare-legged. We hang like leaves in autumn. We aren’t the stolid men. We scribble in familiar ink about sunfalls and night. We see the white in the sky, and sigh. We lie with penciled grins. We aren’t the men, any men. We rip at the neck and wonder why while rattlers roll in. Bent as a number, crooked, sundered, we aren’t the idle lightning if black thunder.

Tu Fu, “Thoughts While Traveling at Night” There’s a wind in the grass — Is there here a boat’s mast claiming my lonely night too? I see the stars can’t be called hanged, exactly, just hanging down, not over emptiness, but honest ground, the moon trying the black skin of this river, black corpse    ... But, even plainer — I wonder if these words, my words, will ever bring me fame. I have my age, my injuries. They limit me. I’m like some spook bird I know, solo and roped between where rotting happens and a sky.

About the dead having available to them all breeds of knowledge, some pure, others wicked, especially what is future, and the history that remains once the waters recede, revealing the land that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived, simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences silences: sometimes a boy will slip from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why, sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.

I saw I dreamt Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope Not closed on their breathing But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow Suspended From the mood of a tree not American they were African Ugandan Nigerian Without a license a right to touch The sin their touching incites And I heard their names called out Revision Or Die and You Must Repent And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots Called up from the mob Of their mothers their fathers With Christ in the blood who had Christ in the blood Who sung out “Abide with Me” This was my eyes’ closed-eyed vision This is what a darkness makes And how did I move from that distance to intimacy So close I could see The four soles of their feet so close I was kneeled Could lick Those feet as if I was because I became The fire who abided I saw that I dreamt Their black skin made blacker by my feeding I thought Christ Why did I think Their black skin tipped blacker by this American Feeding but just one shot up A cry African it was American O Lord abide with me It was human lusty flat You had to be in the hollow of it to taste it You had to see how in such lack Invention takes hold They say some dreams come in the moment Of waking Stitched because daylight likes a story That some dreams are extensions Of an itch Thief-walking the coral of the brain I say But I did feel that one blue mouth blow out As I felt The mood of that tree As I saw the other turn away apart stay with silence I stayed with southern silence

O fly away home, fly away. — Robert Hayden There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see what the world sees seeing him. They know an image of him they themselves created. He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger, each limb adjusted, because it’s had to, to achieve finally flight — though what’s believed in him is a flightlessness, a sinking-down, as any swamp-mess of water I’m always thinking of might draw down again the washed-up body of a boy, as any mouth I’ve yearned for would take down, wrestler-style, the boy’s tongue with its own    ... What an eye can’t imagine it can’t find: not in blood, swollen in the stiff knees of a cypress, not definitely in some dreaming man’s dream — Let’s have his nature speak. What will the incredible night of  him say here, to his thousand moons, now that he can rise up to any tree, rope or none, but not fear it?