872 Life poems

(for Philip Haas) The television set hung in its wire-net cage, protected from the flung bottles of casual rage, is fetish and icon providing all we want of magic and redemption, routine and sentiment. The year-old tinsels hang where an unclaimed no-hoper trembles; fly-corpses cling to the grimy flypaper. Manhattan snows swarm on star-boxed waters, steam trails from warm subway ventilators . . . Welcome to the planet, its fluorescent beers buzzing in the desolate silence of the spheres. Slam the door and knock the snow from your shoe, admit that the vast dark at last defeated you. Nobody found the Grail or conquered outer space; join the clientele watching itself increase.

child, in the august of your life you come barefoot to me the blisters of events having worn through to the soles of your shoes. it is not the time this is not the time there is no such time to tell you that some pains ease away on the ebb & toll of themselves. there is no such dream that can not fail, nor is hope our only conquest. we can stand boldly in burdening places (like earth here) in our blunderings, our bloomings our palms, flattened upward or pressed, an unyielding down.

The cat wants to be a strong thing—a hand, a tree. The girl wants to be a pirate, in a tree. The tree wants to be the pond with its face of shining. The pond wants to be the sun who dumps its sugar on the grass. The grass wants to be the foot, its sole, its heel. The foot wants to be the brain who always gets to choose. The brain wants to be the feet dumb in their shoes. The shoe wants to be the buckle that the girl shines with a cloth. The buckle wants to be the magpie lifting what shines. The magpie wants to be the egg in the nest touching its brother. The egg wants to be the feather. The feather wants to be the mite, devouring its plume.

I swear on the melody of trumpet vines, ants feasting through animal crackers, Burt’s Bees, Tyler Perry movies, my daddy’s .38 slug, footie-socks inside high-top Jordans, disidentification, drag queens, blond dreadlocks, headstones salt-and-peppering the grass, vanilla wafers in banana pudding, Zeus-swan chasing, blunt-guts, sharp thumbnails, keloid scars, cash-only bars, R&B songs, on what the pot called the kettle. I put that on my mama’s good hair, on playing solitaire with a phantom limb, the white woman I go home to, my auntie’s face when she says:You know he always loved them pink toes. I put that on everything, on the signifiers I gobble up, candlesticks blown out by whistling lips. I put that on dervishing records scratched on down-beats, empty beehives, fresh-fade head-slaps, hand claps, bamboo shoots, liminality, mestizos, the purple-black crook of my arm, split sternums, on You can’t save him now. I put that on skinny jeans, get rich quick schemes—Gotta get that C.R.E.A.M. Know what I mean?—freckled black faces, leafless trees throwing up gang signs, phlegm hocked onto streets. I swear I catch more stones than catfish. I lose more collard greens than sleep. I think nothing is here but us darkies, high yellows, red bones, cocoa butters. Someone, no, everyone has jungle fever. Don’t touch my forehead. Blond as moonshine, mute trombone choking. I put that on Instagram. Post me to the endless chain of signifiers. Strawberry gashes on kneecaps,Let me get some dap, Newports, Kool’s, and folding chairs instead of barstools, that white drool caked on your face.Mommy please wipe away the veil. I thought I was passing into the eye of the streetlamp. I swear. I promise on frondless palm trees, long pinkie nails, sixteen years, serve eight, and Miss Addie’s red beans and rice, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the brother on the Cream of Wheat box.It don’t mean a thing if it don’t buckle your knees. Open your hands. I’ll give you a song, give you the Holy Ghost from a preacher’s greasy palm—When he hit me, I didn’t fall, felt eyes jabbing me, tagging me.Oh no he didn’t!— give you the om from the small of her back. I put that on double consciousness, multiple jeopardy, and performativity.Please make sure my fetters and manacles are tight. Yea baby, I like bottomless bullet chambers. I swear on the creation of Uncle Tom— some white woman's gospel.She got blue eyes? I love me some—on Josiah Henson, the real Uncle Tom, on us still believing in Uncle Tom. Lord, have mercy! Put that on the black man standing on my shoulders holding his balls. Put that on the black man I am—I am not—on the black man I wish I was.

Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when the names of things hadn't had time to stick; back when the smallest breezes melted summer into autumn, when all the poplars quivered sweetly in rank and file . . . the world called, and I answered. Each glance ignited to a gaze. I caught my breath and called that life, swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet. I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names? Back when everything was still to come, luck leaked out everywhere. I gave my promise to the world, and the world followed me here.

Maybe it was my old friend Fascination who first let me know that Danger was right across the hall, or maybe it was the unrealized absence of pollen, or, was it the nearness, Danger, of your hair’s blatant softness, just toweled. Or, I wanted to stop thinking — and, I wanted to ask, Do you think God understands attraction? Surely, right? Or, I wanted you to notice my anger, which you might not characterize as dangerous, per se, but rather, fickle, a synonym for “mercurial.” Maybe that’s typical. Yup, there is a liquid sharpness in me I wouldn’t unlid except    ...    damn, Danger, there’s this certain way you draw out epiphany    ... You’re messy, Danger, baby, meaning untidy, confusing, monumental, great in size, and also, of or serving as a monument, which leads me to reconsider the dimensions of sandwiches, as well as apartheid, the aphid, and the scarab beetle. Danger, can you feel me tremble? But I am saying nothing, dear Danger, you don’t already know — you’re used to being pursued with rage, unwanted advice, riddles. That’s not me, respectfully — Joy is always waiting to cyclone you with nothing more than a matchbook, a long gaze, a warm bowl.

joy in the day's being done, however clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists, the packages nestling together, no one home waiting for dinner, for you, no one impatient for your touch or kind words to salve what nightly rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling that one is really as alone as one had feared. One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy to see over the strip mall darkening right on schedule a neon-proof pink sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth, cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up and lit as if by a match struck somewhere in the throat much deeper down.

After IVAN ALBRIGHT’s Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida She arrived as near to virginal as girls got in those days—i.e., young, the requisite dewy cheek flushed at its own daring. He had hoped for a little more edge. But she held the newspaper rolled like a scepter, his advertisement turned up to prove she was there solely at his bidding—and yet the gold band, the photographs ... a mother, then. He placed her in the old garden chair, the same one he went to evenings when the first tug on the cord sent the bulb swinging like the lamps in the medic’s tent over the wounded, swaddled shapes that moaned each time the Screaming Meemies let loose, their calculated shrieks so far away he thought of crickets—while all around him matted gauze and ether pricked up an itch so bad he could hardly sketch each clean curve of tissue opening. I shut my eyes, walk straight to it. Nothing special but it’s there, wicker fraying under my calming fingers.

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther; how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything— how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

There may be chaos still around the world, This little world that in my thinking lies; For mine own bosom is the paradise Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled. Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled, Unmindful of the changing outer skies, Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies, Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled. I heed them not; or if the subtle night Haunt me with deities I never saw, I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw To hide their myriad faces from my sight. They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.