Yusef Komunyakaa

If you're one of seven Downfalls, up in your kingdom Of mulberry leaves, there are men Betting you aren't worth a bullet, That your skin won't tan into a good Wallet. As if drugged in the womb & limboed in a honeyed languor, By the time you open your eyes A thousand species have lived & died. Born on a Sunday Morning, with old-world algae In your long hair, a goodness Disguised your two-toed claws Bright as flensing knives. In this Upside-down haven, you're reincarnated As a fallen angel trying to go home.

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's Insignia on our sneakers, We outmaneuvered to footwork Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot Swish of strings like silk Ten feet out. In the roundhouse Labyrinth our bodies Created, we could almost Last forever, poised in midair Like storybook sea monsters. A high note hung there A long second. Off The rim. We'd corkscrew Up & dunk balls that exploded The skullcap of hope & good Intention. Lanky, all hands & feet...sprung rhythm. We were metaphysical when girls Cheered on the sidelines. Tangled up in a falling, Muscles were a bright motor Double-flashing to the metal hoop Nailed to our oak. When Sonny Boy's mama died He played nonstop all day, so hard Our backboard splintered. Glistening with sweat, We rolled the ball off Our fingertips. Trouble Was there slapping a blackjack Against an open palm. Dribble, drive to the inside, & glide like a sparrow hawk. Lay ups. Fast breaks. We had moves we didn't know We had. Our bodies spun On swivels of bone & faith, Through a lyric slipknot Of joy, & we knew we were Beautiful & dangerous.

I went into the forest searching for fire inside pleading wood, but I can’t say for how long I was moored between worlds. I heard a magpie’s rumination, but I don’t know if its wings lifted the moon or let it drift slow as a little straw boat set ablaze on a winding river. I learned the yellow-eyed wolf is a dog & a man. A small boy with a star pinned to his sleeve was hiding among thorn bushes, or it was how the restless dark wounded the pale linden tree outside a Warsaw apartment. Night crawls under each stone quick as a cry held in the throat. All I remember is my left hand was holding your right breast when I forced my eyes shut. Then I could hear something in the room, magnanimous but small, half outside & half inside, no more than a song— an insomniac’s one prophecy pressed against the curtains, forcing the ferns to bloom.

The river stones are listening because we have something to say. The trees lean closer today. The singing in the electrical woods has gone dumb. It looks like rain because it is too warm to snow. Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding, we know you can't be everywhere at once. Have you corralled all the pretty wild horses? The memory of ants asleep in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur. The magpies gaze at us, still waiting. River stones are listening. But all we can say now is, Mercy, please, rock me.

In the day’s mirror you see a tall black man. Fingers of gold cattail tremble, then you witness the rope dangling from a limb of white oak. It’s come to this. You yell his direction, the wind taking your voice away. You holler his mama’s name & he glances up at the red sky. You can almost touch what he’s thinking, reaching for his hand across the river. The noose pendulous over his head, you can feel him grow inside you, straining to hoist himself, climbing a ladder of air, your feet in his shoes.

When the trees were guilty, hugged up to history & locked in a cross-brace with Whitman's Louisiana live oak, you went into that mossy weather. Did you witness the shotguns at Angola riding on horseback through the tall sway of sugarcane, the glint of blue steel in the bloodred strawberry fields? Silence was backed up in the cypress, but you could hear the birds of woe singing praise where the almost broken- through sorrow rose from the deep woods & walked out into moonshine as the brave ones. You went among those who had half a voice, whose ancestors mastered quicksand by disappearing. Maybe our paths crossed ghosts hogtied in the wounded night, but it is only now I say this: Galway, thanks for going down into our fierce hush at the crossroads to look fear in the eye.

Beauty, I’ve seen you pressed hard against the windowpane. But the ugliness was unsolved in the heart & mouth. I’ve seen the quick-draw artist crouch among the chrysanthemums. Do I need to say more? Everything isn’t ha-ha in this valley. The striptease on stage at the Blue Movie is your sweet little Sara Lee. An argument of eyes cut through the metaphor, & I hear someone crying among crystal trees & confetti. The sack of bones in the magnolia, What’s more true than that? Before you can see her long pretty legs, look into her unlit eyes. A song of B-flat breath staggers on death row. Real men, voices that limp behind the one-way glass wall. I’ve seen the legless beggar chopped down to his four wheels.

Forgive me, soldier. Forgive my right hand for pointing you to the flawless tree line now outlined in my brain. There was so much bloodsky at daybreak in Pleiku, but I won’t say those infernal guns blinded me on that hill. Mistakes piled up men like clouds pushed to the dark side. Sometimes I try to retrace them, running fingers down the map telling less than a woman’s body— we followed the grid coordinates in some battalion commander’s mind. If I could make my mouth unsay those orders, I’d holler: Don’t move a muscle. Stay put, keep your fucking head down, soldier. Ambush. Gutsmoke. Last night while making love I cried out, Hit the dirt! I’ve tried to swallow my tongue. You were a greenhorn, so fearless, even foolish, & when I said go, Henry, you went dancing on a red string of bullets from that tree line as it moved from a low cloud.

We piled planks, sheets of tin, & sandbags across the creek till the bright water rose & splayed both sides, swelling into our hoorah. Our hard work brought July thrashers & fat June bugs in decades of dead leaves. Water moccasins hid in holes at the brim of the clay bank as the creek eased up pelvic bones, hips, navel, & chest, to eye level. When the boys dove into our swim hole we pumped our balled fists to fire up their rebel yells. The Jim Crow birds sang of persimmon & mayhaw after a 12-gauge shotgun sounded in the deep woods. If we ruled the day an hour the boys would call girl cousins & sisters, & they came running half-naked into a white splash, but we could outrun the sunset through sage & rabbit tobacco, born to hide each other’s alibis beneath the drowned sky.

Her eyelids were painted blue. When she closed her eyes the sea rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots, leaving behind silence above & below a thousand years old. He stood beneath a high arched window, gazing out at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets unfurled, their offshore gestures a dance of living in bluish entourage. He was only the court’s chief jester. What he said & did made them laugh, but lately what he sometimes thought he knew could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig. He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor. Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea. He had seen the ravishing empress naked in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow. Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud. Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold, the great one would become a weeping boy slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules.