505 History and politics poems

makes wind the way it whirls about and blows the neighboring names of other signatories away. The point of it is not the John or Jane Doe it names; the point’s the quill in motion as if still stuck and aquiver in goose skin. The trick to writing well isn’t up the sleeve. It is the sleeve that fluffs up the flourish, that blooms around the stunted stamens of the fingers and distracts us from our grasping for the sun or the uncertain scratching of the stylus.

If Cynthia be a queen, a princess, and supreme, Keep these among the rest, or say it was a dream, For those that like, expound, and those that loathe express Meanings according as their minds are moved more or less; For writing what thou art, or showing what thou were, Adds to the one disdain, to the other but despair, Thy mind of neither needs, in both seeing it exceeds.

—in memoriam Cheikh Anta Diop, and for John Henrik Clarke, Ivan van Sertima, Adotey Bing, Aida Brako, Vincent Odamtten, and by special request, Esi Doughan and Kinna Likimani. Who was it said the reason why you never see Black Folks properly e-v-e-r on film or TV is ’cause White Folks “find them threatening”? Whopei! Abae-o-o-o! We always thought our beautiful black skin was the Problem. So Afia and Ola Eye-leen, Lola, and Tapu bleached and blotched their skins ugly to please our masters and our masters’ servants. Now don’t come telling me flat noses, thick lips, and small ears must also disappear to put the world at ease? That must explain why the Princess Nefertiti and the youthful King Tut were dragged to Michael Jackson’s beauty doctor long before Young Michael was born, and also why the Sphinx who looked like Great Ancestor King Khafre is being redone! We should have known we were in trouble the day we heard a Corsican general traveled to Giza by way of Paris and a crown to shoot the Sphinx’s nose off for not-at-all-looking like his. Enfin! Helas!! Mon Dieu!!! Ebusuafo, for years the Sphinx stood massive eternal riddled with wisdom and all very thick-lipped very flat-nosed. We never saw him photographed head-on. But in the year 2020 the New Sphinx will be unveiled full visage on view straight nose raised thin lips tight and even, maybe, blue-eyed: a perfect image of the men who vested so much interest in his changing face. You see,Wekumei, when folks figure you are their slave your past belongs to them. And mind you, the Man will try to grab our future too. Shall we let him?

I. ADMIRAL Laid out on vellum, the past is a long wound. It unfolds five centuries later, beneath the heavy pens of scholars. The world shifts and spins as the Admiral's bronze astrolabe measures the paths between stars. The sky is written in the sea's uneasy mirror, and mermaids comb their hair in the distance. They are not, he writes,so beautiful as I have heard. He dreams of his own circuitous route to the Heavens. God and the Crown. Both want too much. II. GOVERNOR At Guanahani, they swam to the caravel bearing parrots and balls of cotton thread, these people so unlike him they could not not be saved. Too angry to sleep, the Governor haunts every room in his castle. The servants whisper in their own tongue. The severed hands of the Taino wave in clear salt water, in pink-tinted water. They wave as the gold mines dry up, as the Governor leaves Hispaniola in chains. Mermaids, dog-headed men and women with breastplates of copper— They draw their bows, and arrows cover the shore of Columbus's dream. No, not the Taino, whom he once called in dios. They touch his white skin. They have the faces of Christian angels.

Every sand rushes the beaches are first people’s museum ample by laughter original (overseers) things must change where names are forgiven ports shores bays renamed won’t hurt the truth for children histories futures. The mouth who named mountains for brainwave oversea shook weekage house living, stay by a dead cold rotten lie. Whitefellas must derigetter their conzinerices atturies. Beach have turn not by your Scotland bream them down under sir Scot cos you’ve stole Blackfellas alots. Homestead will fall again for huppy Yumbas, gaining restored trust to not live in past. Telegraphic Aborigines were always in first port worlds. Aquarium birds mammals sing now, tell us substantial ramps up on the banks that flanked the dreamers times occupants. Nature rates over new buildings. New names for the city towns not virgin bush inkeep as the real keeper are watching every development. Renames IDs of all needs domain pleasant rebirth to grow majority. First houses were here by natives nice and right to season changing by dreaming winds rain hot people’s names ... Dromana man reclaim names first foremost.

This prisoner and other “ghost detainees” were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment and conditions, officials said. —“Rumsfeld Ordered Iraqi Suspect Held as ‘Ghost’ Prisoner,” San Francisco Chronicle , June 17, 2004 The ghost prisoner, a murderer, wishes he was invisible, sheer air, already dead. His narrow bed washes him away to dream escape through holy gaps that open in the grin of his small son. Lost teeth offer him a freedom so absurd he wakes and laughs. No one hears the ghost prisoner. Whether he groans or bears stoically what instruments we’ve paid to play this march toward a freedom so absurd we wake and silently shake our heads. We do not speak ill of the dead. The ghost prisoner, still murderer, wishes he was visible, fiery air, rallying the dead. His narrow cell just the place for prayer. Holy, holy, a ghost’s revenge pushed through gaps in his own gashed mouth, a curse so absurd, he wakes to its howl. No one says his name, his crimes, how many jolts it took to resurrect him as a betrayer of insurrection, paying for freedom’s ring. We do not want to know what it took. We’d rather not speak the dead ill. We do not want to know what it took to make him wish he were dead still.

In 1915 my grandfather’s neighbors surrounded his house near the dayline he ran on the Hudson in Catskill, NY and thought they’d burn his family out in a movie they’d just seen and be rid of his kind: the death of a lone black family is the Birth of a Nation, or so they thought. His 5’4” waiter gait quenched the white jacket smile he’d brought back from watered polish of my father on the turning seats, and he asked his neighbors up on his thatched porch for the first blossom of fire that would bring him down. They went away, his nation, spittooning their torched necks in the shadows of the riverboat they’d seen, posse decomposing; and I see him on Sutter with white bag from your restaurant, challenged by his first grandson to a foot-race he will win in white clothes. I see him as he buys galoshes for his railed yard near Mineo’s metal shop, where roses jump as the el circles his house toward Brooklyn, where his rain fell; and I see cigar smoke in his eyes, chocolate Madison Square Garden chews he breaks on his set teeth, stitched up after cancer, the great white nation immovable as his weight wilts and he is on a porch that won’t hold my arms, or the legs of the race run forwards, or the film played backwards on his grandson’s eyes.

Freedom is a rocket, isn’t it, bursting orgasmically over parkloads of hot dog devouring human beings or into the cities of our enemies without whom we would surely kill ourselves though they are ourselves and America I see now is the soldier who said I saw something burning on my chest and tried to brush it off with my right hand but my arm wasn’t there— America is no other than this moment, the burning ribcage, the hand gone that might have put it out, the skies afire with our history.

Stripes and stars, Antique cars, Pretty girls, Baton twirls, Spangled gowns, Friendly clowns, Smiling folks, Papered spokes, Marching feet, Endless heat, Clapping hands, High school bands, Town traditions, Politicians, Perspiration, Celebration!

1 Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part of history. No, her story is an illumination of history, the matchstick lit in the black seam of time. Or, no, her story is separate from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct from the stream of people that led to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness of which she is the momentary foreground. Maybe history is a net through which just about everything passes, and the pieces of her story are particles caught in the interstices. Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary that has no part in history at all, if history is about what is included, what is made important. History is the galleon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth century, swaying like a drunk who will take six months to finally reach his house. She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean. The war is over, though her husband is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident among the tall white officers. Her hair is marcelled like a movie star’s waves, though she has been too sick with the water’s motion to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two, the blur of need at the center of each day’s incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean. Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void. 2 Research is mourning, my friend says. Which means what, exactly, for the things listed in the archives as filling the galleons when they left Cebu and Manila — ivory objects, jade objects, copper objects, brass objects, lacquer objects, mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture, pearls, rubies, sapphires, bolts of cotton cloth, silks and gauzes, crepes and velvets, taffetas and damasks and brocades, stockings, cloaks, robes, kimonos, bed coverings, tapestries, linens, church vestments, rugs, blue-and-white porcelain that numbered 1,500 in one ship, wax, tallow candles, cordage, sailcloth, musk, borax, camphor, cigars, varieties of tea, cinnamon that was dried and powdered, 40,000 pounds of it listed in one ship’s manifest, cloves, pepper, nutmeg, tamarind, ginger, martaban jars from Burma, dragon jars from China, Vietnamese jars, Siamese jars, Spanish jars, 800 jars found with the wreck of one salvaged ship, jars that would have contained tar for caulking, oil, wine, bizcocho bread, salted meats, dried fruits, lard, bacon, beans, chickpeas, lentils, flour, garlic, cheese, honey, rice, salt, sugar, food for months, not enough food, not enough water, chickens, cows, pigs, up to one thousand souls depending on whether the ship had a tonnage of 300 or 500 or 1,000 or 2,000, ships that in the 250 years of the trade route wrecked somewhere along the way more often than they arrived in Acapulco, sailors, mercenaries, officers, noblemen and their entourages, priests and missionaries, slaves that were called indios or chinos, nails, tools, iron cask hoops, fireworks, opals — elegy? 3 We didn’t want to be noticed, so we put charcoal on our faces. I listen to the hours of tape, of the two of us at the dining table. All the girls, looking like dirt./My father was always drinking Questions about the town, her parents, the names of people or with women, my mother had to take care of the business./ that only she could now remember. The images, I imagined, My sister broke her back when she was a child, she grew up scrolling in her mind, and translated into the answers she gave. into a hunchback. She died very young./They set up a dance Sometimes pausing, not because she couldn’t recall, but didn’t at the municipal tennis courts to celebrate the end of the war, want to recall badly, the pause a kind of gap between what she and he was there, in hisUSuniform./He always insisted that knew and what the words could do. The two things a voice we sit at the front, but when I was by myself on the bus I sat can say when it is saying one thing, the things that suddenly somewhere in the middle. I didn’t want trouble./I was around return when you are speaking, like pockets of color coming to fifty-five when I had my first real job, working as the security life in your mind: I listen to her with my skin and my eyes, at Macy’s./I always liked to read. I wanted to go to college my ears. I had had the notion that asking her about her life like my sisters, but I got married./You know that wedding might add something to what I thought of as my art, as though dress in the picture, we had to borrow it from our neighbor./ her past and her love could be vectors of use. But I started to I liked Japan when he was stationed there. It was so clean. realize that what I actually needed to know, I would have Then Norfolk. Richmond./I was so sick on the ship, I can’t to conjure for myself, because what we know most deeply remember much. Your mama just kept running all around. we guard best, even as she spoke, laughed, passed the glow It was a navy ship./My mother’s name is Canuta Sacay and of each story to me, like a document I could have in hand my father’s name is Enrique Omega. My grandparents were but could not understand. I put the tape away, felt for years farmers outside Ormoc./I was born in Ormoc, December 8, that it was enough, the responsibility done. Our conversation 1924or25./This was the apartment we lived in in Maryland. stopped when my aunt came to take her out for some errands. That’s Junior there in the picture. And there’s your mama. Chatter, chairs moved around, then noises that are just noises. 4 In Madrid I orient myself     I walk on the wide boulevards and know an empire is its boulevards     I stand below the angel skeptical of the beauty of angels     at the royal gardens I count the 138 kinds of dahlias     at the crystal palace I imagine the exhibition of plants indigenous to my islands     I walk up the street of the poets     read the bronze lines on the ground the longing and song of the pirate     in one museum I stare at Picasso’s lightbulb     in the oldest neighborhoods I wonder if  José Rizal walked these streets     studying diseases of the eye during the day     writing his novel in the night in another museum I look     at the paintings of the dwarves of  the horses     of  the undying fruit     in the train station I visit the memorial for the murdered     in the great white square at dawn I walk     inscribe myself  like letters on a page at the naval museum I look into the face of  Magellan     show the painting my face     I sing the neighborhoods of Huertas and Chueca     maybe only in Madrid     is the light a gold weight always     at the supermarket I overhear     two Filipinos speaking and I turn away and break     I find myself in the cathedral     in the movie theater     where I watch a movie without understanding the words spoken     around a corner I stop because a kind of meadow     has been grown on the side of a building     like a tallness of heart     a dream carried into waking     my life breathing before it     incredible and true