478 Identity poems

Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army, And he drew six dollars a month as a pension, And stood on the corner talking politics, Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs; And I supported the family by washing, Learning the secrets of all the people From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts. For things that are new grow old at length, They’re replaced with better or none at all: People are prospering or falling back. And rents and patches widen with time; No thread or needle can pace decay, And there are stains that baffle soap, And there are colors that run in spite of you, Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress. Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets The laundress, Life, knows all about it. And I, who went to all the funerals Held in Spoon River, swear I never Saw a dead face without thinking it looked Like something washed and ironed.

I arise around survival of the event as worse than the event The whole place surrounds the smell I take one step toward and ten paces back breathless with the mirrors with the fees and meters Feces I fax my demon family weeping on the bridge again My condition was induced as follows Releasing actual sales numbers, trying to mount the policeman or his horse tonguing captains manually strong simultaneous tendencies to approach and avoid appearance and avoidance Men come to my cherry doors to carry on about finance and cricket coaxing a cavernous oath wrestling natives into nestling My part is basically to hatch with regard for human dignity and life In my best foreign automobile stunting the stupor fronting us In order to love my country better I offer monthly meter readings I am filled with rhythm, passion and speed protruding in public popping my collar into a wreck My father sits me down Son, he says, don't let them enter your mouth I wrote a narrative about our collective pain and went shopping

I’m folding up my little dreams Within my heart tonight, And praying I may soon forget The torture of their sight. For time’s deft fingers scroll my brow With fell relentless art— I’m folding up my little dreams Tonight, within my heart.

Universe Galaxy Solar System Planet Continent Country State City Me

1. Balak in Hebrew (devastator)—King of Moab son of Zippor (sparrow), meaning he who was always running away into the desert as the Israelites were fast on his back. Angry, humiliated, full of vinegar and sap, looking for the diviner. 2. Balak (in Turkish, eccentric variant) meaning baby buffalo— something forging Anatolian rivers, Armenian fossil of the word, flushed downstream. 3. Who drowned wading in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There the sky is cochineal. There the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes. 4. If you thought of diaspora, you were thinking of emerald stones. If you thought of the marshes of snails and magenta bugs, you were wading in the reeds. Ur: like rolling a good Merlot on the palate till it runnels up the nose. Ah: breath of the unknown. Tu: also, everything, self and side of mountain. The soul sweats. The blue knifes the canyon. In a cave, a man lived on herbs and water; the sky’s grisaille was a visitation; the leaves were out of toot sin Jants; the angels were alpha and omega— 5. This road goes north— no need to ask where you are, sentimental pop songs are stuck in the CD shuffle there’s a valley, a river, a smoking something— if you ask what color is the sky can anyone say—cloudless, clotted, open?

Having outlived Allen I am the one who has to suffer New York all by myself and eat my soup alone in Poland although sometimes I sit with Linda he met in Berkeley or San Francisco when he met Jack, the bread just coarse enough, the noodles soft but not thin and wasted, and not too salty the way the Chinese further down sometimes make them, the name still on my mind whatever the reason for mystery, or avoidance, though rat Netanyahu and pig that swings from a needle or lives in some huge incubator, they do darkness where there was light, the name hates them, the name in hiding, the name with a beard, and Linda she loves the name though she invokes her Christ as Jack her lover and tormentor did and taught her to do though it is too easy, that, it troubles me but what can I say, what should I say while we walk north on the right hand side, past the pork store and the hardware store, me lecturing on Logos (my God) and what not Hebrews and Greeks where Allen and I once kissed, Jack in the sun now.

Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical; then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing. Trailer to keep her in; he asked me if I knew her ‘auction name.’ Walked over the scorch; what are values when there’s nothing here? The wing of a dead soul grows into all the lace you see through, foreigner, lice-ridden article of divestment. Splendid vices pouring outcomes over the eager cash flow promotions. So many of the dead came to me that their transparencies covered my visage, I’m too near you. Don’t you want to see? We came from faraway camps, forsaking the human because it broke our bodies into pieces for the torturer’s pet, who propositions you. There is always a slant on it. The trees must go down; or light affects your eyes badly. We pleaded for an adjustment, before we’d recognizably died. You told me you were a heart, but you were guarding a tower. You said you were a failure, but you helped destroy us. Wings all over me, stuck to my skin, there’s no point to it why are you here when there’s nothing? We just don’t believe it. Now not no never you. I wasn’t you. You have to talk to me my name is irretrievable. No one letting you go because you are prized for not existing except as a body, now not. No I don’t exist, alighting and ghoulishly begging you for a drop of your blood, a morsel of your flesh. Yes take some of me, though there are so many others with flesh. But they’re too rich to give. I know they will never let you in, you beautiful kids who haunt the corridors extending through the invisible world, so you can find your way. So you can see past the smoke of disastrous fear acting out of dreams: it creeps everywhere. See how it took them over, for they had no mind to stand against any fantasy the instigators chose. Had no minds at all. When I was little, no one told me I’d have to suffer. Who can be a child? And the ghoul patiently explains how the wing of a word can extend till the barrier is made, so they can’t see us. If you say beauty, that will be ignored, and we can hide. It was his name a long time ago, before the auctions began. Her face then was large and younger. She can be lice or ghoul. I want that, I don’t want action. But I will have to live off bits of you. The new definition of witch is one who lets them eat you, if they have to. Because you keep regenerating. Oh that’s such an oldy, and all that flying. Sometimes they do—the man who showed me a few things sits all day. The teaching is to let them come as far as inside you even, empty enough; I can hear them and render affection Why, if there’s nothing? Is this nothing? But you are destroyed We shake all the time. You remind me of someone else I knew. The wing is inscribed, for involute. Not to beg in the offering of primal services, we have come here. No one would let us tell anything but our bodily humiliations; had to do differently, not for redemption, because we are more than redemption. I am my maker. The shape formed by the bits of mirror glued on is unimportant. They’re inside my chest and stomach, and they glitter in there. Then if light disattaches, comes up to be spoken, you can see and you can hear. This is true because each of you has this too. Has all the bright pieces inside: there was nothing else left to be. Then I say it, like these pages, or how they would love me for hosting them. The earliest people feared them, and subsequent ones deny the dead. Why would I be afraid of all the people dead and martyred? I thought you were talking about words. You knew I wasn’t. Dido who had to be delivered from the wrong story: I want you to know I’m no longer left over. What about our library, nothing good left there? I want to read the fashion of when you were old a long time ago. Gothic roses in the type; I’m an ancient Had read every the book of before they arrested me. I had crossed the black plain, I had held tears it was abrupt to be walked in a herd pushing us, wherever we went to be shot, or executed in the earlier style. It is a timeless death placed next to the most beat-up books. Only a book can love me now. We’re reading without real eyes; I’ve read everything too, or in the tradition of telling it is repeated within you what we did. We must have been trying to make something as we are now, but why. You have the ear for it. The light wants you to reply, asking if a shore had been attained or if the language were Dutch or Swahili I didn’t know. It is how you raised the ground, like raising a child every word that comes out of my mouth torn I’m responsible to The wind foul pieces here tries to turn me from tenderness, the way they killed us in the center of the city, that night. The bodies floated in the river while I looked for other souls and saw my face water damaged a new texture and how can I see? Potential returning within its white petals and central whorl. He couldn’t believe someone would hate and betray. I told him, but he refused to believe it; then I left the room. This lace has to be made. Treason said the ghoul that peculiar invention betrayal, how primal was that? In Hesiod after the light, after chaos and lover. Said the armless woman, said the one cut open, said the smallpoxed the strewn children their bodies woven into the page so I could find what they thought, even if babies only cry. Those are the bodies when I was no longer alive but uplifted butterfly of lace with an empty length to bifurcate my symmetry. No I don’t believe the lies of the live. I am a spot of light in order to find out, hanging on because it wasn’t revealed in death. I know what happened to me, she said; bleeding I lay there unblessed. Do I want a blessing now, or a god to rebuild me? We have gone beyond god or new lives, or death, or tribes. I am working on this lace light at present; I accept the drop of sacrificial blood to propitiate me. One piece of you at a time is all I need. I am letting you feed, I say, because I know this has always been. You’ve been telling me for years We needed you, if no one else did. We have this project to change our silence into the beautiful city of a voice.

"We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on." - Reb Carasso Mardohai Simhon claimed the silk scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror. "Look," he said, "my head is separated from my body by a scarf. Who dares give me the life if I say I walk with a knotted mirror under my chin? "The scarf reflects a face, and you think it is of flesh. "Night is the mirror. Day the scarf. Moon and sun reflected features. But my true face, brothers, where did I lose it?" At his death, a large scar was discovered on his neck. The meaning of this anecdote was discussed by the rabbis. Reb Alphandery, in his authority as the oldest, spoke first. "A double mirror," he said, "separates us from the Lord so that God sees Himself when trying to see us, and we, when trying to see Him, see only our own face." "Is appearance no more than the reflections thrown back and forth by a set of mirrors?" asked Reb Ephraim. "You are no doubt alluding to the soul, Reb Alphandery, in which we see ourselves mirrored. But the body is the place of the soul, just as the mountain is the bed of the brook. The body has broken the mirror." "The brook," continued Reb Alphandery, "sleeps on the summit. The brook's dream is of water, as is the brook. It flows for us. Our dreams extend us. "Do you not remember this phrase of Reb Alsem's: 'We live out the dream of creation, which is God's dream. In the evening our own dreams snuggle down into it like sparrows in their nests.' "And did not Reb Hames write: 'Birds of night, my dreams explore the immense dream of the sleeping universe.'" "Are dreams the limpid discourse between the facets of a crystal block?" continued Reb Ephraim. "The world is of glass. You know it by its brilliance, night or day." "The earth turns in a mirror. The earth turns in a scarf," replied Reb Alphandery. "The scarf of a dandy with a nasty scar," said Reb Ephraim. ("Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time." - Reb Mares) And Yukel said: "The bundle of the Wandering Jew contains the earth and more than one star." "Whatever contains is itself contained," said Reb Mawas. The story I told you, as well as the commentaries it inspired, will be recorded in the book of the eye. The ladder urges us beyond ourselves. Hence its importance. But in a void, where do we place it? ("God is sculpted." - Reb Moyal)

Lovers holding pits in their mouths make vows and delight in each other till the underwater infant periscopes his parents and is born an uninvited guest knocks at my door, determined to go deep into the interior of things the trees applaud wait a minute, the full moon and this plan are making me nervous my hand fluttering over the obscure implications of the letter let me sit in the dark a while longer, like sitting on a friend's heart the city a burning deck on the frozen sea can it be saved? it must be saved the faucet drip-drop drip-drop mourns the reservoir

In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley recounts meeting a pensive Malcolm at the Kennedy airport, watching newly immigrated children “romping and playing” in their sudden home. “By tomorrow night,” Malcolm says to Alex, “they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger.” Before cable television arrived in India, America was a white nation. I imagined New England snows dusting California and Miami’s beaches stretched across Appalachia. America was a papier-mâché parody patched together by a cheaply hired prop maker. Geographic accuracy was sacrificed to the interpersonal dramas of Betty and Veronica, and the American banquet was limited to the malted and fried offerings in Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, where the Riverdale gang solved the real geopolitical problems of how to get Reggie off Moose’s back with the help of Archie’s fumbling charms. Here, class warfare came with a side of fries. There were rumors of distant family members “settling” in “North Dakota” or “Oklahoma”—names that put themselves together like Lego castles: hard-edged and jutting out with an abrupt L or a particularly pokey K. Blackness was just a rumor too. Blackness flickered in the background of photographs they sent back from these mysterious locations: here’s an uncle waving at us from a glittering Times Square (Los Angeles); here’s an aunt waving at us mid-way through the soft-focus neon breakfasts with Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup (made from maple leaves); here’s a nephew waving at us next to the poster of a red and white Michael Jordan in a quilted bedroom, his rotund brown body snuggled in tie-dye and tucked into tartan flannel sheets. Blackness was a rumor, that is, until Michael Jackson’s Bad ripped into our consciousness and suddenly, knobby-kneed pre-teens found a way to make stringy curls with coconut oil stolen from their mothers’ kitchens and started moonwalking backwards into my Social Studies classrooms, all snappy crotch and jaunty limbs. We girls rolled our eyes but we kept on watching. It wasn’t long before Jackson’s unsparing gaze, draped in slick black leather, began replacing the glowing pastel Ganeshes and Saraswatis hanging above study desks. But replacing an elephantine god’s soft paunch with lean, mean celebrity did not save us from our own ignorance of how blackness and brownness were connected through a struggle for economic self-realization and human rights. While kids in Chennai were rehearsing Michael Peters’ signature choreography for “Thriller” and pretending to be zombies—little exemplary half-dead spectacles—Union Carbide was industriously shirking responsibility for the Bhopal Tragedy, which choked thousands of Indians to death, and black mortality was spiking in violent, homicidal protest of the US DEA’s drug buys and cocaine busts. In other words, Tamilians blinked away Michael Jackson’s blackness. We kept the heat and thunder of his fat synth bass, which found its way into Ilayaraaja’s electric disco in films of the late 1980s like Vetri Vizha and Agni Natchathiram. We kept the ebullient automation of his moves, which became a muscular theme in Prabhu Deva’s blend of baggy breakdance and whimsical terukoothu folk dancing in the 1990s. But we forgot his blackness. In time, the lightning of his presence was replaced by the grey hum of CNN, Cops, Law & Order, and the dull horror of handcuffs on dark wrists. Posters yellowed, cassettes spooled out, and my moonwalking classmates found their scientific calculators and study guides again. But the rumors of racial difference in George Bush Sr.’s America continued to bloom and wilt in morose cycles in my childhood homes into the 1990s. In damp clusters, it grew like moss under rocks. Rootless, it stretched its stringy arms and held us by the ankles; it grew like mold between bathroom tiles; it spun itself fine and strong, webbing into corners where our brooms couldn’t reach. In time, the mossy rocks lined our after-dinner walks past the hibiscus bushes. In time, a grandmother slipped on the bathroom tiles and stayed in bed, fed conjee by a fatherless girl brought in from the village and the moss grew between her toes and drew her into the earth where they buried the nameless pets and tossed the chicken feathers. In time, the spiders hung so low they fell into pickle jars every time a child fished for a gooseberry or a slice of stony green mango from the brine. And from this brine, in time, we learned to believe that it existed. And as Tamilian families began drifting from the flashy monsoons of India to the June gloom of the California bay or to the sharp wet summers of the Keys, they carried the damp and stench in suitcases and buried it in hushed conversations. They made a poultice of moss and spider web and lodged it in the prayer books, hung it around the children’s necks like a talisman, and they said—as long as she doesn’t marry a black man.