Black Gentleman

O fly away home, fly away. — Robert Hayden There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see what the world sees seeing him. They know an image of him they themselves created. He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger, each limb adjusted, because it’s had to, to achieve finally flight — though what’s believed in him is a flightlessness, a sinking-down, as any swamp-mess of water I’m always thinking of might draw down again the washed-up body of a boy, as any mouth I’ve yearned for would take down, wrestler-style, the boy’s tongue with its own    ... What an eye can’t imagine it can’t find: not in blood, swollen in the stiff knees of a cypress, not definitely in some dreaming man’s dream — Let’s have his nature speak. What will the incredible night of  him say here, to his thousand moons, now that he can rise up to any tree, rope or none, but not fear it?