from The Black Maria

after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.” —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007 Body of space. Body of dark. Body of light. The Skyview apartments circa 1973, a boy is kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who (it is important to mention here his skin is brown) prepares his telescope, the weights & rods, to better see the moon. His neighbor (it is important to mention here that she is white) calls the police because she suspects the brown boy of something, she does not know what at first, then turns, with her looking, his telescope into a gun, his duffel into a bag of objects thieved from the neighbors’ houses (maybe even hers) & the police (it is important to mention that statistically they are also white) arrive to find the boy who has been turned, by now, into “the suspect,” on the roof with a long, black lens, which is, in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon & depending on who you are, reading this, you know that the boy is in grave danger, & you might have known somewhere quiet in your gut, you might have worried for him in the white space between lines 5 & 6, or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding your breath for him right now because you know this story, it’s a true story, though, miraculously, in this version of the story, anyway, the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives to tell the police that he is studying the night & moon & lives long enough to offer them (the cops) a view through his telescope’s long, black eye, which, if I am spelling it out anyway, is the instrument he borrowed & the beautiful “trouble” he went through lugging it up to the roof to better see the leopard body of space speckled with stars & the moon far off, much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing out) the distance between the white neighbor who cannot see the boy who is her neighbor, who, in fact, is much nearer to her than to the moon, the boy who wants to understand the large & gloriously un-human mysteries of the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,” has not been killed by the murderous jury of his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof. This boy on the roof of this poem with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body as I write this poem my body is making a boy even as the radio calls out the Missouri coroner’s news, the Ohio coroner’s news. 2015. My boy will nod for his milk & close his mouth around the black eye of my nipple. We will survive. How did it happen? The boy. The cops. My body in this poem. My milk pulling down into droplets of light as the baby drinks & drinks them down into the body that is his own, see it, splayed & sighing as a star in my arms. Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars. Maybe he will be (say it) the boy on the coroner’s table splayed & spangled by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last. Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning, splendored with breaths, turned, by time, into, at least, this song. This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul” caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net, then, whoosh, back into the sea of space. The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing only things ordinary as water & light.