478 Identity poems

Pour O pour that parting soul in song, O pour it in the sawdust glow of night, Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight, And let the valley carry it along. And let the valley carry it along. O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, Now just before an epoch’s sun declines Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee. Thy son, I have in time returned to thee. In time, for though the sun is setting on A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set; Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone. O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums, Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air, Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes An everlasting song, a singing tree, Caroling softly souls of slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls of slavery.

My weight is four whippets, two Chinese gymnasts, half a shot-putter. It can be measured in bags of sugar, jam jars, enough feathers for sixty pillows, or a flock of dead birds but some days it’s more than the house, the span of Blair Athol Road. I’m the Crooked Spire warping itself, doubled up over town. I measure myself against the sky in its winter coat, peat traces in water, air locked in the radiators at night, against my own held breath, or your unfinished sentences, your hand on my back like a passenger touching the dashboard when a driver brakes, as if they could slow things down. I measure myself against love — heavier, lighter than both of us.

In the old place, there was no place that did not see me. Wherever I went mothers whispered about me like a Greek chorus: I heard that boy...    I heard that. I was just a boy. But it was true, what they said, that I liked other boys, that I had stolen Sarah’s, though he was four years older and they were very much in love. I made him break up with her in a Chili’s parking lot while I waited inside. I was fourteen. How embarrassing to have been fourteen, to have eaten at that Chili’s, often. That summer I had no taste for anything but him. Faintly of chlorine. When he left for college I had no one. Sarah’s friends stared me down at school. I found it was better, if I could not be no one, to be someone. Small, but particular. Specified, which was an apprenticeship for special. Cold, another word for cool.

I see myself in the shadows of a leaf compressed to the green blades growing to a point like the shards of miles of mirrors falling and cracking to perfect gardens. I never inspect the withered assumption of my face’s petty dialogue in raindrops, the deceptive spreading of the words oozing from the skin to the edges of water etched on the ground by gravity and wishing. Passing for the seriousness of my eye, platitudes of my white collar or the perfect posture of my lips, it skirts from the leaves of the plant hiding me and sits stoic like stone in my pupil, mute and unassuming, like Rashi. To gather myself I will swim naked in the wind, bending my blind elbows in circles, stopping now to dance like the cherubic gold on the ark, and gather myself from the particles of this excitement another structure, one closely resembling the beginning.

I lived between my heart and my head, like a married couple who can't get along. I lived between my left arm, which is swift and sinister, and my right, which is righteous. I lived between a laugh and a scowl, and voted against myself, a two-party system. My left leg dawdled or danced along, my right cleaved to the straight and narrow. My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation, my right stood upright as a Roman soldier. Let's just say that my left side was the organ donor and leave my private parts alone, but as for my eyes, which are two shades of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo. Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow while Adam puts his right foot down. No one expected it to survive, but divorce seemed out of the question. I suppose my left hand and my right hand will be clasped over my chest in the coffin and I'll be reconciled at last, I'll be whole again.

I did not want my body Spackled in the world’s Black beads and broke Diamonds. What the world Wanted, I did not. Of the things It wanted. The body of Sunday Morning, the warm wine and The blood. The dripping fox Furs dragged through the black New York snow—the parked car, the pearls, To the first pew—the funders, The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of The world. Their faces. I wanted not That. I wanted Saint Francis, the love of His animals. The wolf, broken and bleeding— That was me.

I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.

Born, I was born. Tears represent how much my mother loves me, shivering and steaming like a horse in rain. My heart as innocent as Buddha's, my name a Parisian bandleader's, I am trying to stand. Father is holding me and blowing in my ear, like a glassblower on a flame. Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling of formal precision and stoicism. Growing, I am growing now, as straight as red pines in the low mountains. Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl. I become distressed watching the president's caisson. We, we together move to the big house. Shining, the sun is shining on my time line. Tears, copper-hot tears, spatter the house when Father is drunk, irate, and boisterous. The essence of self emerges shuttling between parents. Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel's tongue draws me out of the pit. I drop acid with Rita. Chez Woo eros is released. I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man's tongue. The draft card torn up; the war lost. I cling like a cicada to the latticework of memory. Mother: "I have memories, too. Don't let me forget them." Father: "I'm glad the journey is set. I'm glad I'm going." Crows, the voices of crows leaving their nests at dawn, circle around, as I sit in a gold kimono, feeling the subterranean magma flows, the sultry air, the hand holding a pen, bending to write, Thank you, Mother and Father, for creating me.

ninety-nine names for my god though i know none for my [     ] a failing not of my deity but of my arabic      not the language itself rather the overeager mosaic i hoard      i steal       i borrow from pop songs          & mine from childhood fluency    i guard my few swearwords like tinkling silver anklets     spare & precious & never nearly enough to muster a proper arabic anger      proper arabic vulgarity     only a passing spar always using the names of animals i am not polite         i am only inarticulate overproud      of my little arsenal a stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss through the window    of my taxi & i deploy     my meager weapons [dog]          [pig]         [donkey] & finally        my crown jewel i pass my tongue across my teeth crane my neck about the window & call        [your mother’s                  ]

Don't look at me for answers. Who am I but a sobriquet, a teeth-grinder, grinder of color, and vanishing point? There was a time of middle distance, unforgettable, a sort of lace-cut flame-green filament to ravish my skin-tight eyes. I take that back— it was forgettable but not entirely if you consider my heavenly bodies . . . I loved them so. Heaven's motes sift to salt-white—paint is ground to silence; and I, I am bound, unquiet, a shade of blue in the studio. If it isn't too late let me waste one day away from my history. Let me see without looking inside at broken glass.