Poem for My Father

for Quincy T. Trouppe Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table moving away, snaking down, screwing its stitched magic into chitlin circuit air, its comma seams spinning toward breakdown, dipping, like a hipster bebopping a knee-dip stride, in the charlie parker forties wrist curling, like a swan’s neck behind a slick black back cupping an invisible ball of dreams & you there, father, regal, as an african, obeah man sculpted out of wood, from a sacred tree, of no name, no place, origin thick branches branching down, into cherokee & someplace else lost way back in africa, the sap running dry crossing from north carolina into georgia, inside grandmother mary’s womb, where your mother had you in the violence of that red soil ink blotter news, gone now, into blood graves of american blues, sponging rococo truth long gone as dinosaurs the agent-oranged landscape of former names absent of african polysyllables, dry husk, consonants there now, in their place, names, flat, as polluted rivers & that guitar string smile always snaking across some virulent, american, redneck’s face scorching, like atomic heat, mushrooming over nagasaki & hiroshima, the fever blistered shadows of it all inked, as etchings, into sizzled concrete but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths of white major league legends, of who was better than who beating them at their own crap game, with killer bats, as bud powell swung his silence into beauty of a josh gibson home run, skittering across piano keys of bleachers shattering all manufactured legends up there in lights struck out white knights, on the risky edge of amazement awe, the miraculous truth sluicing through steeped & disguised in the blues confluencing, like the point at the cross when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who like old sachel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch before coming back with a hard, high, fast one, is slicker sliding, & quicker than a professional hitman— the deadliness of it all, the sudden strike like that of the “brown bomber’s” crossing right of sugar ray robinson’s, lightning, cobra bite & you, there, father, through it all, catching rhythms of chono pozo balls, drumming, like conga beats into your catcher’s mitt hard & fast as “cool papa” bell jumping into bed before the lights went out of the old, negro baseball league, a promise, you were father, a harbinger, of shock waves, soon come