Tim Seibles

I’m a’kickin’ but not high, and I’m a’flappin’ but I can’t fly. — Florence Church A carpet of light, the ocean alive < half a moon muting the stars. I tell myself despair    is just a bad attitude:Get up, I say.Look— and the shimmer spends its name in my head. _____ These days    midlife holds the jagged edge: my nephew in prison, a prisoner> friends insane with work or sick of trying to be loved, my parents handing over their lives like evidence: my good mother, her mind     a trail of crumbs in a woods flocked with birds. --/-- To raise a child    break it like a wild horse — bend the will:get up, get dressed. I remember Emlen School staring me down, my lunch box, September: the spiked fence freshly painted. Then, the goodbye from my mother who’d fought my hard hair, lipstick like mist on my cheek. --/-- That instant when eyes meet and slide away — even love blinks, looks off like a stranger. With: Who are you with? --/-- I suspect everything. Outside the air moves a giant bird I cannot see. Still laced in this brown body: my aging heart — a-loom     a-loomdoom— still minds my thoughts, but rolls his eyes. _____ To see >< to be seen:  the life of the visible.  Don’t be shy. Glances pick my face. Once, I was a sperm and an egg, but they didn’t see me. --/-- Too small to walk alone: I held my father’s index finger. Philadelphia police caped in their black jackets — big badges     almost hungry — looking at us. --/-- In a mall: say a food court on Saturday     or a stadium just before the game. There’s this drone, this steady, muttering thrum punctured by packages — plastic this, paper that — torn and torn. “It’s hard not to be hungry.” --/-- Time     for bed: my mother reading The Three Little Pigs

No one would burn your name for not seeing the ant’s careful antennae testing the air next to your shoe, six legs almost rowing it along. Who would be upset if you brushed one off-handedly off your arm, undone by the tiny steps:what do they want

I remember that first time: the empty auditorium, her voice, the dark all around us, her mouth reaching into mine. She was Freddy’s foxy older sister, and I didn’t know why she wanted to kiss me. She had already finished high school and probably shouldn’t have been walking the halls, but she always called me her friend. So one Monday after gym, I found myself beside myself in front of her house—with my trench coat and lunch bag— probably not looking much like Shaft. Inside, the air held warm milk and we talked a bit about her baby    and her Aunt who paid the rent painting cars. Maybe she liked me because we were both black and mostly alone in the suburbs, but I hadn’t thought about that. It was her voice that got me—banked fire, the color of dusk—her voice, and my name was smoke in her mouth. I think about it more than I should now, that January noon—an hour before algebra—how most days I’d be thinking football    or replaying the seventy-some kisses I’d gotten over those lean years, but that day Donna and me were on the couch munching potato chips.Rrruffles have rrridges, she kidded coming from checking the baby who’d slipped into a nap. I was kind of disappointed that we hadn’t done anything, but I needed time to get back to school, so I started to stand. She said wait, look at this mess, and with her left hand, she brushed the crumbs from my lap the way you’d whisk away lint— then, swept over my pants again— to be thorough, I guessed, but slower and then some more, as if her hand were getting    drowsy. You know how sometimes you see something but just can’t believe it—like a squirrel bobbling a biscuit on your kitchen counter or a cricket creeping the red feathers of your mother’s Sunday hat? Her hand there, on my lap, could easily have been a five-fingered flying saucer from the fifth dimension. For awhile, I just watched and wondered if she knew where her hand had landed    but it was me who didn’t know: me with my six dozen kisses and the great Eden of my virginity. How do we not talk about it every day: the ways we were changed by the gift in someone’s touch—your body, suddenly a bright instrument played by an otherwise silent divinity. When I heard my zipper, I couldn’t have said where my arms were    or what a clock was for: I had no idea    I could be such a stranger and still be myself. How could I have known what a girl might do to a boy with her mouth     if she felt like doing what her mouth could do? It was a kind of miracle: the dreamed impossible—my soul finally called to my flesh. I didn’t know what I didn’t know    and then I knew.

It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in schoolday morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at fifteen there’s so much left to believe in, that a girl with sunset in her eyes, with a kind smile, and a bright blue miniskirt softly shading her bare thighs     really could be The Goddess. Even the gloss on her lips sighed Kiss me    and you’ll never do homework again. Some Saturdays my ace, Terry, would say, “Guess who was buying Teaberry gum in the drugstore on Stenton?” And I could see the sweet epiphany still stunning his eyes and I knew that he knew that I knew he knew     I knew— especially once summer had come, and the sun stayed up till we had nothing else to do but wish and wonder about fine sistas in flimsy culottes and those hotpants! James Brown screamed about: Crystal Berry, Diane Ramsey, Kim Graves, and her. This was around 1970: Vietnam to the left of us, Black Muslims to the right, big afros all over my Philadelphia. We had no idea where we were, how much history had come before us—how much cruelty, how much more dying was on the way. For me and Terry, it was a time when everything said maybe, and maybe being blinded by the beauty of a tenth grader was proof that, for a little while, we were safe from the teeth that keep chewing up the world. I’d like to commend my parents    for keeping calm, for not quitting their jobs or grabbing guns    and for never letting up about the amazing “so many doors open to good students.” I wish I had kissed Delores Jepps. I wish I could have some small memory of her warm and spicy mouth to wrap these hungry words around. I would like to have danced with her, to have slow-cooked to a slow song in her sleek, toffee arms: her body balanced between the Temptations’ five voices and me—a boy anointed with puberty, a kid with a B average and a cool best friend. I don’t think I’ve ever understood how lonely I am, but I was closer to it at fifteen because I didn’t know anything: my heart so near the surface of my skin I could have moved it with my hand.

It’s true: I almost never smile, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in love: my heart is that black violin played slowly. You know that moment late in the solo when the voice is so pure    you feel the blood in it: the wound between rage and complete surrender. That’s where I’m smiling. You just can’t see it—the sound bleeding perfectly inside me. The first time I killed a vampire    I was sad: I mean we were almost family. But that’s so many lives ago. I believe in the cry that cuts into the melody, the strings calling back the forgotten world. When I think of the madness that has made me    and the midnight I walk inside—all day long: when I think of that one note    that breaks what’s left of what’s human in me, man, I love    everything