Yusef Komunyakaa

I was here before the blackamoors were photographed & cataloged, when they first ran up to me & then receded into their poses, descendants of archival Hamites destined to serve their brothers & sisters in a red baroque room, each silent as an iron doorstop. Some peered out of perches askance, shining lanterns & sconces, ready to please, or eager to cast a guiding light among centuries of shadows, a patina of mystery lost in Tuscan dusk. At least their attire isn’t stitched rags. If ebony & alabaster could talk, Lord, the volumes of gossip among  gold-leafed tributes we would hear as vinegar turns back to wine, driftwood to bread. They’ve been perfectly arranged, & almost reveal whose sweat glosses their smooth skin in these rooms of rehearsal. I saw one shift slightly & blink, or maybe it was a dark hum coming from the olive grove, a feeling brought across the sea. They are not claw-footed props & furniture for drunken nights posed to grab a hat or fur coat, dressed in skeins of filigree & false gems, offering a bowl of  black grapes to each envoy or a guest holding a dagger behind his upright back.

I can’t touch you. His face always returns; we exchange long looks in each bad dream & what I see, my God. Honey, sweetheart, I hold you against me but nothing works. Two boats moored, rocking between nowhere & nowhere. A bone inside me whispers maybe tonight, but I keep thinking about the two men wrestling nude in Lawrence’s Women in Love. I can’t get past reels of breath unwinding. He has you. Now he doesn’t. He has you again. Now he doesn’t. You’re at the edge of azaleas shaken loose by a word. I see your rose-colored skirt unfurl. He has a knife to your throat, night birds come back to their branches. A hard wind raps at the door, the new year prowling in a black overcoat. It’s been six months since we made love. Tonight I look at you hugging the pillow, half smiling in your sleep. I want to shake you & ask who. Again I touch myself, unashamed, until his face comes into focus. He’s stolen something from me & I don’t know if it has a name or not— like counting your ribs with one foolish hand & mine with the other.

They came as Congo, Guinea, & Angola, feet tuned to rhythms of a thumb piano. They came to work fields of barley & flax, livestock, stone & slab, brick & mortar, to make wooden barrels, some going from slave to servant & half-freeman. They built tongue & groove— wedged into their place in New Amsterdam. Decades of seasons changed the city from Dutch to York, & dream-footed hard work rattled their bones. They danced Ashanti. They lived & died. Shrouded in cloth, in cedar & pine coffins, Trinity Church owned them in six & a half acres of sloping soil. Before speculators arrived grass & weeds overtook what was most easily forgotten, & tannery shops drained there. Did descendants & newcomers shoulder rock & heave loose gravel into the landfill before building crews came, their guitars & harmonicas chasing away ghosts at lunch break? Soon, footsteps of lower Manhattan strutted overhead, back & forth between old denials & new arrivals, going from major to minor pieties, always on the go. The click of heels the tap of a drum awaking the dead.