478 Identity poems

Let it be known to all, the story Of the glorious struggle of my people. Let it be known that black men and women Helped to build this our country. Let it be known that black men and women of the past In an effort to make this country What it ought to be, gave up their very last To make America, a real democracy A true homeland of the free. Let our leaders of today go back into the past And come fighting forth envigored with the spirit Of Turner, and Vesey, Douglass, Tubman and Truth. Let our stalwart black youth, lift their heads in pride As they tell of their fathers' fight for freedom To the white youth by their side. Yes, let it be known. Let all of the old folks tell it Sing it to the babes yet in arms. Let us read the glorious story Right along with our Bible. Let it be known to all, The story of the glorious struggles of my people. Too long…Too long has it been kept from us.

Took me awhile to learn the good words make the rain on my window grown and sexy now I’m in the tub holding down that on-sale Bordeaux pretending to be well adjusted I am on that real jazz shit sometimes I run the streets sometimes they run me I’m the body of the queen of my hood filled up with bad wine bad drugs mu shu pork sick beats what more can I say to you I open my stylish legs I get my swagger back let men with gold teeth bow to my tits and the blisters on my feet I become electric I’m a patch of grass the stringy roots you call home or sister if you want I could scratch your eyes make hip-hop die again I’m on that grown woman shit before I break the bottle’s neck I pour a little out: I am fallen

I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches Losing what little the frost had left them to hold. I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows, Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold. They could not help me. I looked at my hands; they were helpless; Strange and detached, less related to me than the birds. Baffled, I called on the mind: it carried me, floundering, Lost among meaningless phrases, tossed in a welter of words. Too great for my blundering comfort, your anguish confused me. From a great distance, I saw you standing alone. Frozen and stark, in a black iron circle of silence, I could not pity your pain; I could scarcely pity my own.

The poetry’s arrested in his scene, which can’t be trusted, because I saw it through painkillers that softened my head, after I’d asked him what Keats really meant: “Was it a vision or a waking dream?” —You think that really mattered much to him? In my waking vision dream, there’s no glory, no prize committee or dew-drip Paradise. He’s in an attic nook, or dim garage, or the cellar where he actually writes, the space a sheeted granulated matter, his silenced countenance and de-boned body scabby with caked ash about to crust and crack, poems piled at his feet like shoeshine rags. A grave purpled fraughtness colors him. What damaged him to this silence? He still writes and still isn’t heard, as if not being heard is the whole point of it, and who are these children, these waving Halloween windsocks who won’t talk to him? Beyond my busybody vision, he staggers through divorce, stooped, bereft, still writing. Spiky and singing, he out-writes them all, the cheered, spotless others—he howls at their after-dinner-speaker poetry, the monsignors, the suburbans, the woo-woo wisdom merchants weeping to the bank. Poetry’s a weather that doesn’t need a specific place: it’s a storm outside a cellar, sunshine at a bedroom window. Too much schoolroom poisons the idiom. Too much reverence stinks up the joint. The sorrow hanging in the dreamy air seems to confuse him, he can’t understand how his heart came to hurt him like this, confuses it with leaves blurted out by storms, leaves that keep falling fast in the cellar, in poems he writes, the base desires and rage, he says the gods designed the set, stage-manage things, scripted them, the hilarity that hurts us is that none of it really matters, that poetry’s griefs are intimates we don’t choose. They come to us, for us. They cling to body and soul.

Because you were born with your knees tied together under you you are bound to need your hands and resent my knees. Because you were born with and without knees your face remains close to the ground to analyze all the methods the medics use to unhook them: they splint your legs against planks, numb each knee with a balm that makes you feel you are flying through stone. Now you crouch ready to doubt, blinking because it is your body’s to blink. You smile, invincibly obscured. From any closer I couldn’t take you whole so you imagine your hands luring my knees into both sides of your mouth and open your smile into a needy room — molded behind your teeth, a person of pity held down in thick liquid shame. Because you were born to be happy you would skin and uncap the knee of a good giant to make yourself a helmet that could guard you from under the brain, but you cannot get up off those knees.

There is nothing more innocent than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil, neither of us knowing what it will become in the abundance of the planet. It makes a living only by remaining still in its niche. One day it may struggle out of its tender pearl of blind skin with a wing or with vision leaving behind the transparent. I cover it again, keep laboring, hands in earth, myself a singular body. Watching things grow, wondering how a cut blade of grass knows how to turn sharp again at the end. This same growing must be myself, not aware yet of what I will become in my own fullness inside this simple flesh.

But that which most I wonder at, which most I did esteem my bliss, which most I boast, And ever shall enjoy, is that within I felt no stain, nor spot of sin. No darkness then did overshade, But all within was pure and bright, No guilt did crush, nor fear invade But all my soul was full of light. A joyful sense and purity Is all I can remember; The very night to me was bright, ’Twas summer in December. A serious meditation did employ My soul within, which taken up with joy Did seem no outward thing to note, but fly All objects that do feed the eye. While it those very objects did Admire, and prize, and praise, and love, Which in their glory most are hid, Which presence only doth remove. Their constant daily presence I Rejoicing at, did see; And that which takes them from the eye Of others, offer’d them to me. No inward inclination did I feel To avarice or pride: my soul did kneel In admiration all the day. No lust, nor strife, Polluted then my infant life. No fraud nor anger in me mov’d, No malice, jealousy, or spite; All that I saw I truly lov’d. Contentment only and delight Were in my soul. O Heav’n! what bliss Did I enjoy and feel! What powerful delight did this Inspire! for this I daily kneel. Whether it be that nature is so pure, And custom only vicious; or that sure God did by miracle the guilt remove, And make my soul to feel his love So early: or that ’twas one day, Wherein this happiness I found; Whose strength and brightness so do ray, That still it seems me to surround; What ere it is, it is a light So endless unto me That I a world of true delight Did then and to this day do see. That prospect was the gate of Heav’n, that day The ancient light of Eden did convey Into my soul: I was an Adam there A little Adam in a sphere Of joys! O there my ravish’d sense Was entertain’d in Paradise, And had a sight of innocence Which was beyond all bound and price. An antepast of Heaven sure! I on the earth did reign; Within, without me, all was pure; I must become a child again.

I laid myself down as a woman And woke as a child. Sleep buried me up to my chin, But my brain cut wild. Sudden summer lay sticky as tar Under bare white feet. Stale, soot-spotted heapings of winter Shrank in the street. Black headlines, infolded like napkins, Crashed like grenades As war beat its way porch by porch Up New Haven's façades. Europe: a brown hive of noises, Hitler inside. On the sunny shelf by the stairs My tadpoles died. Big boys had already decided Who'd lose and who'd score, Singing one potato, two potato, Three potato, four. Singing sticks and stones May break my bones (but names hurt more). Singing step on a crack Break your mother's back (her platinum-ringed finger). Singing who got up your mother When your daddy wasn't there? Singing allee allee in free! You're Dead, you're dead, wherever you are!

Their long skirts and high heels battled away: Depending on the ground’s and breezes’ whim, At times some stocking shone, low on the limb— Too soon concealed!—tickling our naïveté. At times, as well, an envious bug would bite Our lovelies’ necks beneath the boughs, and we Would glimpse a flash—white flash, ah! ecstasy!— And glut our mad young eyes on sheer delight. Evening would fall, the autumn day would draw To its uncertain close: our belles would cling Dreamingly to us, cooing, whispering Lies that still set our souls trembling with awe.

The twist of the stream was inscrutable. It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill stream that flowed for several miles by the side of Route 302 in northern Vermont— and presumably does still—but I’ve not been back there for what seems like a long time. I have it in my mind’s eye, the way one crested a rise and rounded a corner on the narrow blacktop, going west, and saw off to the left in the flat green meadow the stream turning briefly back on itself to form a perfect loop—a useless light-filled water noose or fragment of moon’s cursive, a sign or message of some kind—but left behind.