Terrance Hayes

— after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals, your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip. I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song.

Dear Ol' Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw, I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is Never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party.Trill stands for what is truly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse.Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is Never mistake what it looks like for what it is

The dead were still singing Turn the lights down low Beneath Yellow Bridge where years before, clowning And ass out, Stick jumped with nothing but the State Championship trophy in his righteous clutch. The water Was supposed to be deepest there, and for three seasons Straight MVPs: Charlie "Fly" Kennison, Long Timmy Long, And Rocket Jefferson, those are the names I knew, jumped Free. But Stick's ankle broke. I fished him out, crumpled And bawling like the day he was born, like an object of Baptism, and a life of bad luck followed in the shape of Floods and fractured lightning, and then, numb, tooth- Less, and changed, the dead refused burial, striking out, 2 By 2, 4 by 4, from the morgue house to raise trouble at The bridge. I started hearing birds everywhere after that.

Pretty soon the Negroes were looking to get paid. My partner, Big Trend, wiped his ox neck and said He wasn't going to wait too much longer. You Know that look your daddy gets before he whups you? That's how Big Trend looked. There was a pink scar Meddling his forehead. Most people assumed a bear Like him couldn't read anything but a dollar, But I'd watched him tour the used bookstore In town and seen him napping so I knew he held more Than power in those hands. They could tear A Bible in two. Sometimes on the walk home I'd hear Him reciting poems. But come Friday, he was the one The fellas asked to speak to the boss. He'd go alone, Usually, and left behind, we imagined the boss buckled Into Trend's shadow because our money always followed.

I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped. After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?" We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents. We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends first because beneath our twangor slept what I'll call a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool then, and placed my hand over the guitar string's wind- ow til it stilled. "When the moon's black," I said. "Be faithful."

Even if you love the racket of ascension, you must know how the power leaves you. And at this pitch who has time for meditation? the sea walled in by buildings. I do miss the quiet, don't you? When I said, "Fuck the deer antlered and hithered in fur," it was because I had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist. If I were in charge, I would know how to fix the world: free health care or free physicals, at least, and an abiding love for the abstract. When I said, "All of history is saved for us," it was because I scorned the emancipated sky. Does the anthem choke you up? When I asked God if anyone born to slaves would die a slave, He said: "Sure as a rock descending a hillside." That's why I'm not a Christian.

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head, Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle, The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model. In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself, A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman. To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away. I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding, The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel. The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing, In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows, But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy. When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness. The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me. At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel, A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers, The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O. When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy. I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat. An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral. The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees: A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat. The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness, All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other, They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open, They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife. The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed. I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased, Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me. Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops, A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests, When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell, Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips. You must look without looking to make the perfect circle. The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid Until the drawing is complete.

after Gwendolyn Brooks I. 1981 When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is a school I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late. Standing in the middle of the street last night we watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We watched him run to us looking wounded and thin. He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin. He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June the boy would be locked upstate. That night we got down on our knees in my room.If I should die before I wake. Da said to me,it will be too soon. II. 1991 Into the tented city we go, we- akened by the fire’s ethereal afterglow. Born lost and cool- er than heartache. What we know is what we know. The left hand severed and school- ed by cleverness. A plate of we- ekdays cooking. The hour lurk- ing in the afterglow. A late- night chant. Into the city we go. Close your eyes and strike a blow. Light can be straight- ened by its shadow. What we break is what we hold. A sing- ular blue note. An outcry sin- ged exiting the throat. We push until we thin, thin- king we won’t creep back again. While God licks his kin, we sing until our blood is jazz, we swing from June to June. We sweat to keep from we- eping. Groomed on a die- t of hunger, we end too soon.

Did your father come home after fighting through the week at work? Did the sweat change to salt in his ears? Was that bitter white grain the only music he’d hear? Is this why you were quiet when other poets sang of the black man’s beauty? Is this why you choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty? Were there as many offices for pain as love? Should a black man never be shy? Was your father a mountain twenty shovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train leaving a lone column of smoke? Was he a black magnolia singing at your feet? Was he a blackjack smashed against your throat?

After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and a house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made. I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what's left of the deed.