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Walking backward from the sea, scales shedding, you seek the cave. This is why the French door admits only ocean. You stare into the louver and forget how to get out. Lull is the word, or loll. The sea returns, completing your pulse, the waves live, each breath of yours worship.
From So Much Things To Say: 100 Calabash Poets, edited by Colin Channer and Kwame Dawes. Copyright © 2010 by Terese Svoboda. Used with permission of Calabash International Literary Trust and the author.
Who loots the dew or enjoins a shadow to guard a tree? The bird in the pie can't pretend to arms, its claws rock the coin in the crust. The train's single eye examines the tree that the pie holds the fruit of, its engine rasps past the bird as if smoke lent its shadow. And the dew? Surely it's a dark gulp under a tall hat the bird wings over. Not noise, not the founding father's nose. Repeat after me: I solemnly swear: I could swear otherwise, my lips flying too.
A red-faced lion raises its maw. I could be in the supermarket, saran wrap thrown back but there's Hope Wanted Alive scrawled along all the mud-slick side streets where kids roll bottle tops, kids hawk one seed— in Nairobi the slum blues where I stop, gallery-wise. Forty children in clean costumes of show-off purport to live in the two rooms abutting the paintings. You could drink the sugar cane at the end of the street or you could set fire to it. I did see truck tires without trucks.
A De Chirico head aslant on a coverlet,
body mostly flown, the dazed prayers dumb.
The ritual cigarette, the ritual drink:
incense, holy water. No ambivalence,
the woman inside fled, the whispers
I make of tenderness—hers—she sleeps through.