Yusef Komunyakaa

Did a big brain       raise us into mountains to range over the valley, to see the approach     before whoever it was     knew they would walk a path between dusk & dawn half-awake? An eye squinted, & sex as idea made the lids dance. Now, the brain pauses     on the edge of ascension or surrender, one sleepy hand pointing at a totem, & the other weighing a stick or jagged stone.

Drunken laughter escapes Behind the fence woven With honeysuckle, up to where I stand. Daddy’s running-buddy, Carson, is beside him. In the time It takes to turn & watch a woman Tiptoe & pull a sheer blouse off The clothesline, to see her sun-lit Dress ride up peasant legs Like the last image of mercy, three Are drinking from the Mason jar. That’s the oak we planted The day before I left town, As if father & son Needed staking down to earth. If anything could now plumb Distance, that tree comes close, Recounting lost friends As they turn into mist. The woman stands in a kitchen Folding a man’s trousers— Her chin tucked to hold The cuffs straight. I’m lonely as those storytellers In my father’s backyard I shall join soon. Alone As they are, tilting back heads To let the burning ease down. The names of women melt In their mouths like hot mints, As if we didn’t know Old Man Pagget’s Stoopdown is doctored with Slivers of Red Devil Lye.

Ito ran to a window. He danced. He howled. He cursed the moon, interned in a camp before he was carted on a ship back to Tokyo. Hadn’t he almost died for art the evenings he ate bread soup? If he wished to forget those days & nights dancing in drawing rooms in London, or translating Fenollosa’s notes on Noh, he’d have to unbraid himself from At the Hawk’s Well, & then let go of the Egyptian mask Dulac painted him into — claws, beak, feathers, & legend. Why did that silly boy tell a story about his grandmother weeping when she first saw him dressed in his grandfather’s samurai armor to hold the gaze of Lady Cunard? He was again studying the fox holding a biscuit in his hand, saying, “I went to a great hill in Hampstead & I made my soul into the soul of a fox.” Finally, he would let go of his Europe, & not think of those he loved & taught, Isadora lost. Now, powerless & alone, he dances his ten steps again & again, wanting to know if a hawk could peck the eyes out of a fox.

After Hasior They fired a bullet into the head of each question, trying to kill Kant’s unending argument with Hegel. They burned laws, moral codes, & the Golden Means. Anyone serving tea & cookies to Death, looking or acting as if he knew love, stood before the firing squad. All questions had to go. Pronoun or noun. If it crawled on busted kneecaps, whimpering & begging for mercy, it was still half of a question. *     *     * The little skyscraper of glass boxes sunlight strikes the same time of day at a certain angle outside Zakopane looks like condos where nimble ghosts still stand up to the darkest answers. No, I can’t hear one voice pleading. But I do hear gusts coming down from the hills. No, you’re wrong again. The crow perched on the totem is real. Look at how the light lifts off its wings, but I wish I could understand what it is he’s trying to say. I think I heard a name.

The victorious army marches into the city, & not far behind tarries a throng of women Who slept with the enemy on the edge Of battlements. The stunned morning Opens into a dust cloud of hooves & drums. Some new priests cradle Stone tablets, & others are poised With raised mallets in a forest of defeated Statuary. Of course, behind them Linger the turncoats & pious Merchants of lime. What’s Greek Is forged into Roman; what’s Roman Is hammered into a ceremony of birds Headed east. Whatever is marble Burns in the lime kilns because Someone dreams of a domed bathhouse.

If I am not Ulysses, I am his dear, ruthless half brother. Strap me to the mast so I may endure night sirens singing my birth when water broke into a thousand blossoms in a landlocked town of the South, before my name was heard in the womb-shaped world of deep sonorous waters. Storms ran my ship to the brink, & I wasn't myself in a kingdom of unnamed animals & totem trees, but never wished to unsay my vows. From the salt-crusted timbers I could only raise a battering ram or cross, where I learned God is rhythm & spores. If I am Ulysses, made of his words & deeds, I swam with sea cows & mermaids in a lost season, ate oysters & poison berries to approach the idea of death tangled in the lifeline's slack on that rolling barrel of a ship, then come home to more than just the smell of apples, the heavy oars creaking the same music as our bed.

For Carol Rigolot When deeds splay before us precious as gold & unused chances stripped from the whine-bone, we know the moment kindheartedness walks in. Each praise be echoes us back as the years uncount themselves, eating salt. Though blood first shaped us on the climbing wheel, the human mind lit by the savanna’s ice star & thistle rose, your knowing gaze enters a room & opens the day, saying we were made for fun. Even the bedazzled brute knows when sunlight falls through leaves across honed knives on the table. If we can see it push shadows aside, growing closer, are we less broken? A barometer, temperature gauge, a ruler in minus fractions & pedigrees, a thingmajig, a probe with an all-seeing eye, what do we need to measure kindness, every unheld breath, every unkind leapyear? Sometimes a sober voice is enough to calm the waters & drive away the false witnesses, saying, Look, here are the broken treaties Beauty brought to us earthbound sentinels.

For Derek Walcott An island is one great eye gazing out, a beckoning lighthouse, searchlight, a wishbone compass, or counterweight to the stars. When it comes to outlook & point of view, a figure stands on a rocky ledge peering out toward an archipelago of glass on the mainland, a seagull’s wings touching the tip of a high wave, out to where the brain may stumble. But when a mind climbs down from its high craggy lookout we know it is truly a stubborn thing, & has to leaf through pages of dust & light, through pre-memory & folklore, remembering fires roared down there till they pushed up through the seafloor & plumes of ash covered the dead shaken awake worlds away,& silence filled up with centuries of waiting. Sea urchin, turtle,& crab came with earthly know-how, & one bird arrived with a sprig in its beak, before everything clouded with cries, a millennium of small deaths now topsoil & seasons of blossoms in a single seed. Light edged along salt-crusted stones, across a cataract of blue water, & lost sailors’ parrots spoke of sirens, the last words of men buried at sea. Someone could stand here contemplating the future, leafing through torn pages of St. Augustine or the prophecies by fishermen, translating spore & folly down to taproot. The dreamy-eyed boy still in the man, the girl in the woman, a sunny forecast behind today, but tomorrow’s beyond words. To behold a body of water is to know pig iron & mother wit. Whoever this figure is, he will soon return to dancing through the aroma of dagger’s log, ginger lily,& bougainvillea, between chants & strings struck till gourds rally the healing air, & till the church-steeple birds fly sweet darkness home. Whoever this friend or lover is, he intones redemptive harmonies. To lie down in remembrance is to know each of us is a prodigal son or daughter, looking out beyond land & sky, the chemical & metaphysical beyond falling & turning waterwheels in the colossal brain of damnable gods, a Eureka held up to the sun’s blinding eye, born to gaze into fire. After conquering frontiers, the mind comes back to rest, stretching out over the white sand.

First you must have unbelievable faith in water, in women dancing like hands playing harps for straw to grow stalks of fire. You must understand the year that begins with your hands tied behind your back, worship of dark totems weighed down with night birds that shift their weight & leave holes in the sky. You must know what’s behind the shadow of a treadmill— its window the moon’s reflection & silent season reaching into red sunlight hills. You must know the hard science of building walls that sway with summer storms. Locking arms to a frame of air, frame of oak rooted to ancient ground where the door’s constructed last, just wide enough for two lovers to enter on hands & knees. You must dance the weaverbird’s song for mending water & light with straw, earth, mind, bright loom of grain untortured by bushels of thorns.

Zeus always introduces himself As one who needs stitching Back together with kisses. Like a rock star in leather & sapphires—conflagration & a trick of silk falling Between lost chances & never Again. His disguises are almost Mathematical, as Io & Europa Pass from their dreams into his. This lord of storm clouds Is also a sun god crooning desire & dalliance in a garden of nymphs. Some days, he loves gloxinia, & others, craves garlic blooms— Hera, Aegina, & Callisto in the same song.