Yusef Komunyakaa

When the plowblade struck An old stump hiding under The soil like a beggar’s Rotten tooth, they swarmed up & Mister Jackson left the plow Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon. The horse was midnight Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s Pocketwatch.  He shivered, but not The way women shook their heads Before mirrors at the five & dime—a deeper connection To the low field’s evening star. He stood there, in tracechains, Lathered in froth, just Stopped by a great, goofy Calmness.  He whinnied Once, & then the whole Beautiful, blue-black sky Fell on his back.

In a cerulean ruckus Of quilts, we played house Off the big room where They laughed & slowdragged Weekends.The eagle flies On Friday.

Say licked clean at birth. Say weeping in the tall grass, where this tantalizing song begins, birds perched on a crooked branch over a grave of an unending trek into the valley of cooling waters. The soil’s thirst, lessons of earth unmoor the first tongue. Say I have gone back, says the oracle, counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault lines between one generation & next, as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen, & one glimpses what one did not know. Say this is where the goat spoke legends ago in the ring of fire to deliver a sacrifice. To feel signs depends on how & why the singer’s song puckers the mouth. Well, I believe the borrowed rib story is the other way round, entangled in decree, blessing, law & myth. One only has to listen to nightlong pleas of a mother who used all thousand chants & prayers of clay, red ocher blown from the mouth onto the high stone wall, retracing land bridge to wishbone. My own two daughters & granddaughter, the three know how to work praise & lament, ready to sprout wings of naked flight & labor. Yes, hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy to clan, from clan to tribe, & today we worship her sun-polished bones, remembering she is made of questions. No, mama is not always the first word before counting eggs in the cowbird’s nest. It begins in memory. Now, say her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.

He danced with tall grass for a moment, like he was swaying with a woman. Our gun barrels glowed white-hot. When I got to him, a blue halo of flies had already claimed him. I pulled the crumbled photograph from his fingers. There's no other way to say this: I fell in love. The morning cleared again, except for a distant mortar & somewhere choppers taking off. I slid the wallet into his pocket & turned him over, so he wouldn't be kissing the ground.

The sun slides down behind brick dust, today’s angle of life. Everything melts, even when backbones are I-beams braced for impact. Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone shaped into dry air white soundsystem of loose metal under every footstep. Wrecking crews, men unable to catch sparrows without breaking wings into splinters. Blues-horn mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing but the white odor of absence. The big iron ball swings, keeping time to pigeons cooing in eaves as black feathers float on to blueprint parking lots.

Using the gun mounts for monkey bars, children skin the cat, pulling themselves through, suspended in doorways of abandoned helicopters in graveyards. With arms spread-eagled they imitate vultures landing in fields. Their play is silent as distant rain, the volume turned down on the 6 o’clock news, except for the boy with American eyes who keeps singing rat-a-tat-tat, hugging a broken machine gun.

Someone says Tristan & Isolde, the shared cup & broken vows binding them, & someone else says Romeo & Juliet, a lyre & Jew’s harp sighing a forbidden oath, but I say a midnight horn & a voice with a moody angel inside, the two married rib to rib, note for note. Of course, I am thinking of those Tuesdays or Thursdays at Billy Berg’s in LA when Lana Turner would say, “Please sing ‘Strange Fruit’ for me,”& then her dancing nightlong with Mel Torme, as if she knew what it took to make brass & flesh say yes beneath the clandestine stars & a spinning that is so fast we can’t feel the planet moving. Is this why some of us fall in & out of love? Did Lady Day & Prez ever hold each other & plead to those notorious gods? I don’t know. But I do know even if a horn & voice plumb the unknown, what remains unsaid coalesces around an old blues & begs with a hawk’s yellow eyes.

Housed in a boom of blubber & bone, harpooned six times, the giant grew into a dynamo hitched to six taut rope-lines skipping the boat across waves toward the blurry lighthouse. It bled out a long silence but men in oilskins labored with hydraulics of light on water, walked its flank, & tore it down to a storeroom of Nantucket scrimshaw. Ballast stone or sledge? They bashed in the skull & lowered down the boy to haul up buckets of oil for candles that burned a slow, clean, white glow. At ten, he was almost a man whose feet sank into the waxy muck of ambergris. His sweat dripped into a long hour. Big as a barrel, the head echoed a temple nave.

Her red dress & hat tease the sky’s level- headed blue. Outside a country depot, she could be a harlot or saint on Sunday morning. We know Hopper could slant light till it falls on our faces. She waits for a tall blues singer whose twelve-string is hours out of hock, for a pullman porter with a pigskin wallet bulging with greenbacks, who stepped out of Porgy at intermission. This is paradise made of pigment & tissue, where apples ripen into rage & lust. In a quick glance, beyond skincolor, she’s his muse, his wife— the same curves to her stance, the same breasts beneath summer cloth.

Ghost sun half hidden, where did you go? There’s always a mother of some other creature born to fight for her young. But crawl out of your hide, walk upright like a man, & you may ask if hunger is the only passion as you again lose yourself in a white field’s point of view. In this glacial quiet nothing moves except— then a flash of eyes & nerves. If cornered in your head by cries from a cave in another season, you can’t forget in this landscape a pretty horse translates into a man holding a gun.