Roger Reeves

Another dead mare waits in the shoals of some body of water, waits to be burden, borne into a foaming ocean, where it might become food for whales, or, simply empty signifier—hair latched to the sea’s undulation like Absalom’s beauty caught in the playful branches of a tree desiring union, entanglement, thick confusion— but not this mare; she does not get the luxury of a lyric—a song that makes our own undoing or killing sweet even as we go down into the fire to rise as smoke. This horse must lie, eyes open, amongst the stones and fresh water crawfish in Money, Mississippi, listen to the men’s boots break the water as they drop a black boy’s body near her head, pick him up, only to let him fall again there: bent and eye-to-eye with her as though decaying is something that requires a witness —as though the mare might say: on Tuesday after the rain fell, the boy’s neck finally snapped from the weight of the mill fan; he never looked at me again.

Let us descend into the blind world now. — Dante, “The Divine Comedy” As above, so below; as below, so above. — Three Initiates, “The Kybalion” A Lowcountry marsh trembles with the blood of an African Who refused to climb out of the salt and mud of the bay And quite literally lost his head. A hunter named Hunter Waits for the man’s wounds to close and for him to rise Again. Some call this festive cruelty Paradise. Pleasure. Demby, the African made to rise and suffer another shot, Calls it the Afterlife, the unceasing blind world of death He welcomed expecting the end to his captivity and exile. But there is no end to the perfecting of cruelty even now In the Afterlife, where a hawk humped up in the high weeds And a house on fire are a congruent sadness, a brief history Of nature’s one duty for flesh —decay, decay, decay... Sometimes, it is as if every bird in the Afterlife trills this One song. And I forget who I am, but then I look down At my feet shuffling in darkness and hear my name — Till ... Till ... Till ... And I know I am no farmer, blade Or mule driven over some roach-ragged road to field And fray, and sometimes I forget how I came here to After- Life, to pleasure, to domestic violence, to drive, be Driven, and then I look down at my hands. It is a war That brought you this peace, a war that brought you this peace. And then, I heard a question: “Shall we kill all of the masters?” And before I brokered an answer, I heard a voice say: “Then, we must kill ourselves, first. And who will Be left to kill the masters?” I turned to find nothing But a boy in a tree and a girl beside him, their heads Tolling in the wind like pecker-fretted fruit. Voice, I said, Come now or do not come at all. And there, a man I had seen before scratching in dust next to a drill field With a dictionary and a strange astronomy for a face. Ezra, is that you, I asked. “The peasants’ bent shoulders, Odysseus and the dead bullock — call me whatever you’d like. I come to every name like a white ox toward Pisa And the butcher’s road. I come to Paradise dragged By the hair ... with one day’s reading and surrendered Temple.” You do talk funny, I said. “He do the police In different voices,” he said. And when all the voices sound like the police, I said, kill all the voices. And so ran. I ran from Ezra who ran after me and demanded he be My guide. “There is no running from the forest of men. There is no running from men.” I’ll be damned, I said — But before I could finish Ezra said, “That’s right. Be damned. Be here taloned and tumbling the sky down in Paradise. Here. Be in your cage and free.” But here is not the here I seek nor sought. For that here harangues me And I might as well be the nigger coming over The obstacle fence, a periplum of certain disaster, A choir of empty cups sitting loudly before the famished, Your prince, dear Ezra, hanging by his heels in the piazza, The sprezzatura of maggots rummaging the round heart For its divinity and pulse. Ezra, nothing of you but the dead. And so, I ran past the possum running through the skull Holes of a dead man lying in the fog that licked them Into a wet testimony, the possum testifying, too, to their death — Coming, going, in ruins and floating out, out, beyond Their murders and dropped plates, out beyond the Thame-ish Rivers and its drowning traditions. And then I looked back And saw Ezra. He had come to his cage and could go no farther. “Till,” he said. “Bring me up from beneath these decks, One slaver to another.” He winked and I winked back, Handed him the katydid buzzing in my pocket, as I had done Before, dug a trench around him as another had done before, Then said, “Ezra, be here in your cage and free,” and ran. And then I came upon a mountain and then a chasm For which there was no bridge and so turned back To find a possum running behind me, and I asked him, Dear Possum, what do we do with this darkness Between us, and the possum said nothing and ran on Into the darkness, into the chasm and fell speaking of The end of touch, the desire to forget desire, shadows, The fear in a handful of dust, a woman’s mouth, Fear I had known of and visited though now I cringed At the thought of that violence, the violence that I brought — And so thought to throw myself, too, in that chasm When a hand touched my shoulder, a voice said, “Not now, Maybe never. On we go, dear boy, through this weather. Let’s find us another theory of light. Or darkness.” Then, she laughed, for it was a woman with a lit darkness And a careful chin, glasses, her body a tin of tender. What do you know of me, I asked. She said, “Louis, I know of you as I know fog — that it comes on Through the alleys and past the dead boys and girls Who had not wanted to die in those alleys and ornament The city’s sight. Louis,” she said. “I’ve known all your light. But do you know mine?” And I hadn’t, I hadn’t. “I was a taken city burning,” she said, “a burning house Built to heal the sick, a sick house full of healing, The owl, moccasin, and panther — a rising For which there has never been such risen, the total Black. I is the total black. Flame and fox and knot Of the what-nots you would have forgotten if not for me, I am perfect fucking memory, no-dominion-defied, The god-head-glitter-gussied-up-for-the-going-down.” And though I thought I saw I had not seen. Instead Of one body, three. Women. And who and who and who, I asked. They laughed at my asking and said, “You Wouldn’t know us, but we will tell you our names — Mother, Song, and Holy Yoke. Audre, Gwendolyn, And Lucille. Follow us. Or heel.” And where And where should I follow you? They did not answer, Instead, they walked on the edge of the abyss Laughing as if the abyss. “We are what is whatnot, The ever shimmying out of the never-wound. Louis, do you follow or do you fall,” They said. “Are you short or is you tall?” And on and on they played, pleasured, and pigeoned With each other, kiting sound and word between them As I have seen lovers do, passing cigarettes and smoke From one mouth to another, the smoke the shared body Of a God that has no master or mastering plan Other than abiding in darkness, abiding in both Its coronation and crucifixion. On and on we walked. And I followed. Beyond the bears chortling pears From Augustine’s outstretched hand, out beyond the river Scissoring the changing maple, its leaves ambering Then auburn then green each time a child appeared And touched its trunk. We stopped, watched. I asked Who are they. And the one full of light and knives answered, Waving at a few who journeyed to the edge of the water But did not wade in. And why don’t they wade in, I asked. She snickered, quieted, then said, “Wind and foxes, what was never mine but was and was.” As if she knew I did not understand, continued, “‘The ones I got but did not get,’ the wild hair they could not grow But scratches me now as it did once in a dream. Our abortions, Louis, our ones given and gave. Dem. The ones given all of their years at once. And none Or never.” And when she spoke, I saw another come To the shore and wave at me, a boy given and gave, the crushed- Color of late evening long after the pickers have come In and settled near a pot of ox bones boiling in the evening Of their own water, once again predicting the arch And strange astronomy of the flesh and its march march March to October and the battered soil. I mean I turned From the one waving because I could not be beneath The stairs of his steering and stare. Paradise, Why do you bring me to such weather? Why Would any man come down from his noose for this? “Because coming down is exactly the point. All heavens lesser and below heaven. Noose, not ... You came to see what has become of death ...    ” The women spoke as one who had many tongues — All Holy Ghost and gut of a river gabbling over the white Stones. And where are we going, I asked. “Where language begins, Till. Paradise. But over there.” • And wasn’t this paradise that I had entered Through the thick marsh waters out of the cane The crowds fleeced of their living flesh at the far bank The intubated children with their gas masks Hanging from their hands and wandering The sand in wet hospital gowns in this their new cancer Wasn’t this paradise A boy headphoned and heart drunk Swaying at the back of the crowd mumbling to himself Started from the bottom now we’re here Started from the bottom now my whole team is fucking here

cymothoa exigua *: the tongue as what it is not—blemish and parasite: gimp and glottal stop: what question can be answered with a truant mouth: can the lynched man hung from the sails of a windmill taste the lead pipe wedged between his lips: when the signifiers dangle, empty chum lines in a cold creek: when the men in Waco, wearing white straw hats, fraying at the crisp edges of their white shirts, leave Jesse, leave John, leave Paul in ashes in the unpaved streets to choke passing mules into prophecy: when we pinch our noses to staunch the smell of the twice burnt black man burning for a third time this day: when the boys, sweet and good animals, come to what’s been left in shallow ditches: false rib and femur, clavicle and severed hand—quite simply, the language of sorrow: glyph of the gadfly rooting himself into the rotting meat of the dead: when it is too late to refuse our bodies being made urns: corn, unharvested and heavy in its husks: when, in the marketplace, the butcher lifts our tongue from a bed of ice, shouts:who will speak for this flesh: when the tongue answers as all severed tongues do: