478 Identity poems

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

“The experience of truth is indispensible for the experience of beauty and the sense of beauty is guided by a leap in the dark.” Arthur Koestler I. Stoplights edged the licorice street with ribbon, neon embroidering wet sidewalks. She turned into the driveway and leaped in the dark. A blackbird perched on the bouncing twig of a maple, heard her whisper, “Stranger, lover, the lost days are over. While I walk from car to door, something inward opens like four o’clocks in rain. Earth, cold from autumn, pulls me. I can’t breathe the same with dirt for marrow and mist for skin, blurring my vision, my vision’s separate self. I stand drunk in this glitter, under the sky’s grey shelter. The city maple, not half so bitter, hurls itself in two directions, until both tips darken and disappear, as I darken my reflection in the smoking mirror of my home. How faint the sound of dry leaves, like the clattering keys of another morning, another world.” II. She looked out the window at some inward greying door. The maple held her glance, made ground fog from her cigarette. Beyond uneven stairs, children screamed, gunned each other down. Then she sealed her nimble dreams with water from a murky bay. “For him I map this galaxy of dust that turns without an answer. When it rains, I remember his face in the corridor of a past apartment and trace the anguish around his mouth, his wrinkled forehead, unguarded eyes, the foreign fruit of an intricate sadness. With the grace that remains, I catch a glint around a door I cannot enter. The clock echoes in dishtowels; I search love’s center and bang pans against the rubble of my day, the lucid grandeur of wet ground, the strangeness of a fatal sun that makes us mark on the margin of our loss, trust in the gossamer of touch, trust in the late-plowed field.” III. When the sun opened clouds and walked into her mongrel soul, she chopped celery into rocky remnants of the sea, and heard fat sing up bread, a better dying. The magnet in each seed of the green pepper kept her flying, floating toward memories that throb like clustered stars: the dark water laughter of ducks, a tangle of November oaks, toward sudden music on a wheel of brilliant dust where like a moon she must leap back and forth from emptiness. “I remember the moon shimmering loss and discovery along a water edge, and skirting a slice of carrot, I welcome eternity in that sad eye of autumn. Rare and real, I dance while vegetables sing in pairs. I hug my death, my chorus of years, and search and stretch and leap, for I will be apprentice to the blood in spite of the mood of a world that keeps rusting, rusting the wild throats of birds.” IV. In lamplight she saw the smoke of another’s dream: her daughter walk woods where snow weighs down pine, her son cry on a bridge that ends in deep-rooted dark, her man, stalled on a lonely road, realize his torque was alcohol and hatred. “Hungry for silence, I listen to wind, to the sound of water running down mountain, my own raw breath. Between the sounds, a seaborn god plays his reed in the caverns of my being. I wear his amethyst, let go my dreams: Millars, Lacewings, and Junebugs scatter, widen and batter the dark, brightening this loud dust with the fever of their eyes. Oh crazy itch that grabs us beyond loss and lets us forgive, so that we can answer birds and deer, lightning and rain, shadow and hurricane. Truth waits in the creek, cutting the winter brown hills. It sings with needles of ice, sings because of its scar.”

Very soon the Yankee teachers Came down and set up school; But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,— It was agin’ their rule. Our masters always tried to hide Book learning from our eyes; Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery— ’Twould make us all too wise. But some of us would try to steal A little from the book. And put the words together, And learn by hook or crook. I remember Uncle Caldwell, Who took pot liquor fat And greased the pages of his book, And hid it in his hat. And had his master ever seen The leaves upon his head, He’d have thought them greasy papers, But nothing to be read. And there was Mr. Turner’s Ben, Who heard the children spell, And picked the words right up by heart, And learned to read ’em well. Well, the Northern folks kept sending The Yankee teachers down; And they stood right up and helped us, Though Rebs did sneer and frown. And I longed to read my Bible, For precious words it said; But when I begun to learn it, Folks just shook their heads, And said there is no use trying, Oh! Chloe, you’re too late; But as I was rising sixty, I had no time to wait. So I got a pair of glasses, And straight to work I went, And never stopped till I could read The hymns and Testament. Then I got a little cabin A place to call my own— And I felt independent As the queen upon her throne.

She is proud of her papá because he comes to their little grey school, converted from army barracks, to teach español to Mrs. Brenda’s fifth grade. And that means they don’t have to listen to that awful Señora Beister on TV with her screech owl version of “Las mañanitas” and her annoying forefinger to the ear, Escuchen and then to the lips, y repitan. He teaches them to order Coca-Cola en el restaurán– Señor, quisiera una Coca, por favor– and the names of all the utensils– cuchara, cuchillo, tenedor. The children look at him funny when he picks up the knife. Next week he will demonstrate the bullfights he watched in Mexico when he was muy chiquitito. He will choose a boy to snort, stomp, charge the red cloth that Papá will snap at his side as he dodges the sharp-horned strike, stabs invisible swords into the boy’s hide and makes the children laugh.

(For Blues People) In the south, sleeping against the drugstore, growling under the trucks and stoves, stumbling through and over the cluttered eyes of early mysterious night. Frowning drunk waving moving a hand or lash. Dancing kneeling reaching out, letting a hand rest in shadows. Squatting to drink or pee. Stretching to climb pulling themselves onto horses near where there was sea (the old songs lead you to believe). Riding out from this town, to another, where it is also black. Down a road where people are asleep. Towards the moon or the shadows of houses. Towards the songs’ pretended sea.

for David Trinidad I was seventeen in Orlando, heading toward Orange Blossom Trail, where the porn was. Fairvilla Video, its fried, freshened air. I was terrified but also thrilled, on the edge. Can anyone even remember how hard- won a little corner of sex was then, no internet, no hope, no combination? I can’t; I can. In an elaborate bid to convince myself and the clerk I was bisexual, I bought a bisexual video that I can’t recall, and a box that made my heart stop: Leo & Lance. (VHS wasn’t cheap: I spent all my allowance.) I can measure this adventure in increments of shame: tape loop, checkout, the run-walk to my red Buick (no one could miss me), the peel out. And the drive home, anticipation, cruel cellophane . . . Leo Ford, born Leo John Hilgeford, looked like California by way of Dayton. There was his tender love of Divine, that rumored three-way on Fire Island with Calvin Klein. Late in his career he raised rare birds, volunteered at Project Angel Food. He was versatile: so much to give. And Lance, David Alan Reis, from Santa Barbara, or maybe Oklahoma. Poor orphan, the stints in jail, IV drugs, and conversion. Leo and Lance had the chance to work together twice on film— Leo & Lance and Blonds Do It Best— and more than once on the corner. Where have all the hustlers gone, anyway? They died weeks apart, in 1991. Lance first, in May, in San Jose, of AIDS complications. On the death certificate, his job is listed as “model of clothing.” That July, Leo on his motorcycle was struck by a truck on Sunset. “Chillingly, Leo had played a motorcycle accident victim in Games,” says IMDB, so those who knew his oeuvre might have seen it coming. After the wake at Josie’s, his ashes were scattered by the Golden Gate Bridge. A tree in India— IMDB again, as if the truth matters— was planted in his name . . . As I try to get this right, I pull up my cache of scanned porn. Leo & Lance: it begins in synth, Cali melancholy canyon light, and here’s Leo, shirtless, running up a hill in tight denim, letterman jacket thrown over his shoulder— now the tinkling piano; now’s a good time to jerk off by the last of the snow. God, bottle-blond Leo. But wait, who is that loping up the hill, gawky, rugged, also blond, a dumbfounded wow uttered as he watches Leo shoot? Of course: it’s Lance. Before they formally meet, before they go back to the lodge and do what they do better than life, they have a little snowball fight, brief, unexpectedly sweet— like children in the street.

Where am I going today if I'm going anywhere at all without my soul, that bird with its unreadable, unheard name having wandered off again, convinced that it is more than just a word— do we travel far from each other today?— me in my pre-owned Mazda with my radio full of wasps' nest news, my Peshawar & my Rupert Murdoch, all my guilty Murdochs— my destination like a homestead made of fallen maple leaves, the three leaves that form a tipi tipped together by a 5-year-old's hands, a dwelling place, where if I wanted to I could rest my human rights while my soul travels far from its base, lost for a while on its own highly privatized trip, the idea of living forever an idea that is not an eternity at all for my wanderer but a wish the bird has to fly brocaded by herself within the borders of a tapestry, far from some witch queen's cackle, far from that witch who has disguised herself as a sparhawk woven out of dark thread by a Flemish peasant's hands— how far is too far, you ask?— a little foolishness goes a long, long way, I'd say; a lot drops dead in its tracks.

To crease a sheet of paper is to change its memory, says the origami master: what was a field of snow folded into flake. A crane, erect, structured from surface. A tree emerges from a leaf—each form undone reveals the seams, pressed with ruler's edge. Some figures take hundreds to be shaped, crossed & doubled over, the sheet bound to its making—a web of scars that maps a body out of space, how I fashion memory: idling at an intersection next to Jack Yates High, an hour past the bell, I saw a girl fold herself in half to slip beneath the busted chain-link, books thrust ahead, splayed on asphalt broiling in Houston sun. What memory will she retain? Her cindered palms, the scraped shin? Braids brushing the dirt? The white kite of her homework taking flight? Finding herself locked out, or being made to break herself in.

My mother says: When Mama tried to teach me to make collards and potato salad I didn't want to learn. She opens the box of pancake mix, adds milk and eggs, stirs. I watch grateful for the food we have now —syrup waiting in the cabinet, bananas to slice on top. It's Saturday morning. Five days a week, she leaves us to work at an office back in Brownsville. Saturday we have her to ourselves, all day long. Me and Kay didn't want to be inside cooking. She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it into the buttered, hissing pan. Wanted to be with our friends running wild through Greenville. There was a man with a peach tree down the road. One day Robert climbed over that fence, filled a bucket with peaches. Wouldn't share them with any of us but told us where the peach three was. And that's where we wanted to be sneaking peaches from that man's tree, throwing the rotten ones at your uncles! Mama wanted us to learn to cook. Ask the boys, we said. And Mama knew that wasn't fair girls inside and the boys going off to steal peaches! So she let all of us stay outside until suppertime. And by then,

Snow White was nude at her wedding, she’s so white the gown seemed to disappear when she put it on. Put me beside her and the proximity is good for a study of chiaroscuro, not much else. Her name aggravates me most, as if I need to be told what’s white and what isn’t. Judging strictly by appearance there’s a future for me forever at her heels, a shadow’s constant worship. Is it fair for me to live that way, unable to get off the ground? Turning the tables isn’t fair unless they keep turning. Then there’s the danger of Russian roulette and my disadvantage: nothing falls from the sky to name me. I am the empty space where the tooth was, that my tongue rushes to fill because I can’t stand vacancies. And it’s not enough. The penis just fills another gap. And it’s not enough. When you look at me, know that more than white is missing.