Highlights II

I have wanted other things more than lovers …	
I have desired peace, intimately to know	
The secret curves of deep-bosomed contentment,	
To learn by heart things beautiful and slow.	
 
Cities at night, and cloudful skies, I’ve wanted;
And open cottage doors, old colors and smells a part;	
All dim things, layers of river-mist on river—	
To capture Beauty’s hands and lay them on my heart.	
 
I have wanted clean rain to kiss my eyelids,	
Sea-spray and silver foam to kiss my mouth.
I have wanted strong winds to flay me with passion;	
And, to soothe me, tired winds from the south.	
 
These things have I wanted more than lovers …	
Jewels in my hands, and dew on morning grass—	
Familiar things, while lovers have been strangers.
Friended thus, I have let nothing pass.

Love is a flame that burns with sacred fire, 
And fills the being up with sweet desire;
Yet, once the altar feels love’s fiery breath,
The heart must be a crucible till death.

Say love is life; and say it not amiss, 
That love is but a synonym for bliss.
Say what you will of love—in what refrain, 
But knows the heart, ‘tis but a word for pain.

In a world of loss
     gratitude is what 
          I demand for keeping 
     precious catch
within my reach.
     No one despises 
          the shepherd for
     collecting his flock. 
No one accuses 
     the watchman of 
          making a captive 
     of his charge.
I’m like a holster, 
     or sheath, all function 
          and no fury. Don’t 
     you worry as I 
swallow you whole. Those 
     ulcers in my gut 
          are only windows,
     the stoma punched 
in my throat is just 
     a keyhole. Don’t be shy.
          Hand me the rattle 
     of your aching heart
 and I’ll cradle you, 
     bird with broken wing. 
          Let me love you. I
     will hold your brittle 
bones together. I’ll 
     unclasp your beak
         so you can sing.
     It’s a world of always 
leaving but here
     you can always stay.

                                                   After Kabir Carter, Bard College, 26 June 2018

Feeling knives the microphone to cauterize flesh        it amplifies 

Crackles the abrasive metal fabric

Blowtorches feedback hold and heel

Throttles and pauses the cord-pull

Lulls to lunge in transmission      back seat pocket

Alones the sound crowd

Accumulates the solitary intention of hooded jacket front punch

Zippers the match stick ignite

Handcuffs the thick slide probe with plastic tie

Zones between foot and huddle

Shrills the retreat from acted upon          or was it repeat

Tools the self animation 

Insomuch as the metal scrim

On denim is able to inhale

Skin-howl    blister   swipe

Caresses and so abrogates as to grip therefore

Larynxes stride and light step

Dry touch enveloping to self anoint

Tag      identify       anatomy     pulse

Whether pleasure or pain              it  collapses

Second human shell the cosmos

Automaton guest or X

Feeling that ligaments today in predation

It houses       it afflicts         it encircles

or. The deer, nearly
Color blind, see blue

Better than we do, more
Blue than we know, a blue

I am not consoled
Lives beyond me. Imagine

Their sky, saturated, how
Do they bear it, and

The alpine lake where
They drink in summer, glacier-

Fed, reflecting back it all back
Plus. Consider

The glacier, blue at heart deep-
Frozen for millennia, blue

Its core and vanishing
In your lifetime. A rush,

A trickle, this is how
It goes? Around the lake,

Boulders harden themselves. 
Green firs. And there, a perfect

Center, the lake’s clear,
Unreadable eye.

“If you were a star,” you said, “you’d be called Forgive me.”
To which I smiled (you couldn’t see me) and said,
“Or Forgive me not.”

You said “Beware the ides of March on days we’re distant
from bees and flowers.”

“Not if the bees in the mouth don’t sting,” I said,
“and the air we move is a monk’s in a meditative year.”

“Are we the plants or the particles,
the planets or the elements?” you asked,
“and our touchless touching, vector-dependent sex,

and the honey mouth, are they
the silences that waggle the tune
on our foraging routes?”

“When I say honey,” I clarified,
“I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.
We’re no snowflake symmetry

yet to each pollen grain its aperture:
porous, colpate, yet blanketing the earth
as crystals might, and light isn’t refused.”

“And when I say honey,” you said
“I grip my sweetness on your life,
on stigma and anthophile,

and the soporific folded on its synchronous river
that doesn’t intend to dissect my paradise.”

“O captive my captive, we lost and what did love gain,”
I asked, “I haven’t fallen from where I haven’t been,
or exited what I didn’t enter.”

“Seen or unseen,” you said, “I’ll live in your mouth.
We have an extra room. The children like it there,
mead in it their stories and playdough.”

“As if a child is the cosmic dust that made me,
and I’m the suffix, its -ide.”

“And within that child a child.”
“And within that another.”

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand,
Forehead still bowed to forehead—
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed,
There was no gift nor denial.

2.

I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

3.

You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd—strike the thing short off;
Be mad—only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern.
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

                                        —with a line from Louise Glück

Humor functions in the neighborhood as it functioned in the shtetl: the only way into a world insistent on your pain. Something you’d be shot for. If they want you to cry, tears are evasive; if they want you vulnerable, vulnerability’s a cop-out; if they want a confession, your confession is cheap. “When I speak passionately, / that’s when I’m least to be trusted.” A privilege to weep when to laugh is to choke on history. Oh diaspora: seventy-five years ago I’d be gassed beside my sisters, yet here I am, running out for milk in a heated car. Does a funnier joke exist? Yet there’s so many jokes in this neighborhood, that one barely gets a laugh.

                                                                    You’re telling us. 

Yesterday: me, a stone, the river,
a bottle of Jack, the clouds
with unusual speed crept by.

A man was in the middle of me.
I was humbled.
Not by him. The earth,

with its unusual speed,
went from dawn to dusk to dawn.
Just like that. The light

every shade of gold. Gold. I’m
greedy for it. Light is my currency.
I am big with dawn. So hot & so

pregnant with the fire I stole.
By pregnant I mean everything
you see is of me. Daylight

is my daughter. Dusk, my lover’s
post-pleasure face. And the night?
Well. Look up.

Are you ever really alone?

The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so
we drive on together into a sun-gray pane of grime
and dust. My son

puts the passenger seat back as far as it will go, closes
his eyes. I crack my window open for a bit
of fresher air. It’s so

incredibly fresh out there.

Rain, over.
Puddles left
in ditches. Black mirrors with our passing 

reflected in them, I suppose, but I’d
have to pull over and kneel down at the side
of the road to know.

The day ahead—

for this, the radio
doesn’t need to be played.
The house we used to live in

still exists
in a snapshot, in which
it yellows in another family’s scrapbook.

And a man on a bicycle
rides beside us
for a long time, very swiftly, until finally

he can’t keep up—

but before he slips
behind us, he salutes us
with his left hand—

a reminder:

that every single second—
that every prisoner on death row—
that every name on every tombstone—

that everywhere we go—
that every day, like this one, will
be like every other, having never been, never

ending. So
thank you. And, oh—
I almost forgot to say it: amen.

^{Motivated forgetting is a psychological defense mechanism whereby people cope with threatening and unwanted memories by suppressing them from consciousness.
            —Amy N. Dalton and Li Huang}

              in Badagry there is a hung-
              ry well of water and memory

                                                         loss. in Badagry there was a well 
                                                         of people lost across a haven 

of water. in Badagry there was
a port overwhelmed in un-return. 

                                    to omit within the mind is to ebb
                                    heavenward. memory is a wealth 

                                                      choking the brain in un-respons-
                                                      ibility. violence in the mind and 

                                    the mind forgets in order to remember
                                    the self before the violence begot. 

in Badagry trauma washes ungod-
ly memory heavenward. in Bad-

                                       agry there is an attenuation well 
                                       meant to wish away a passage, 

                                                                      meant to unhaven a people.
                                                                      violence is underwhelming

                                         in return. what the body eats, 
                                         the mind waters. responsible 

is the memory for un-remittal. 
royal is the body for return. god is

                                     the mind for wafting. forgetting 
                                     is a port homeward. in Bad- 

                                                   agry hungry memory grows angry.
                                                   in Badagry the memories un- 

                 choke. trauma un-eats the royal. 
                 in Badagry there is a heaven 

                                               of people responsible for the birth- 
                                               right of remembering, for the well 

                                      of us across a haven of water
                                      overwhelmed in un-return.

^{for Malcolm Latiff Shabazz}

yellow roses in my mother’s room    mean
I’m sorry   sadness comes in      generations
inheritance           split   flayed    displayed
better than all the others

crown                                    weight

the undue burden of the truly exceptional
most special of your kind, a kind of fire

persisting unafraid      saffron bloom
to remind us of fragility    or beauty       or revolution

to ponder darkly             in the bright
the fate of young kings

the crimes for which          there are no apologies.

             1.
Pained as he was when he gazed 
upon his father’s face, he held his gaze.

             2.
Toward what he’d never known, he walked,
somehow both arrogant & begging.

The purple of his father’s robes, like a bruise. 

             3.
As a river, over time, can forge
a way through stone, so
absence bore through him,
leaving a valley where his voice
echoes off the canyon walls. 

             4.
His mind had narrowed until all it held
was an idea of father, until so fixed on the idea
his mind seemed under siege. Inside him hummed
a longing, one he felt compelled to fix, so named it ​flaw.

             5.
What the boy wanted:
to finally know his father’s face.
Evidence, at last, of his origin. 

             6.
Felt within, a longing.
Felt and therefore knew
a weakness he wanted to master. 

             7.
A desire to know, and a belief
he deserved to,

these were the human parts of him.

             8. 
Fiery, Dawnsteed, Scorcher, Blaze–

the horses the father owned,

the horses the father, knowing he would fail, let his son steer–

             9.
is this devotion?

             10.
To master, control, rein in;
hoping this might prove him 
a man, perhaps, a god.

             11.
There are gaps knowing cannot fill.

             12.
What boy has not dreamt himself a noble son,
has not prematurely thought himself a man?

             13.
                           He lost control of the reins
& the horses did what one expects
from animals whose lives had always been 
tightly squeezed between two fists:

             14.
breaking from the path they’d always known,

             15.
they galloped nearer to that world from which they’d been kept, 

             16.
not out of malice but a kind of mercy

             17.
for the world the father feared the horses would destroy.

             18.
Finding himself at the mercy of what he’d sought–

             19.
gone too far to turn back, gone far beyond his father now
with further still to go, ignorant of the names
of the horses behind whom he was now dragged like the tail
of a comet hurtling toward earth, as in all directions
he sees the destruction he’d caused:

the flames licking trees at their roots, licking
dry the ocean’s mouth, licking the faces
of each living thing until they’d turned to ash,

until the world without grew hotter than the world within,
until a dizzying heat rose from the soil, until in his feet

             20.
the boy could feel the world ablaze–

             21.
free me from these reins
he cried perhaps to god, 
perhaps to father, 

             22.
the difference indecipherable, more or less insignificant

             23.
for even though he’d met him, the boy still knew himself

             24.
fatherless, godless, no less abandoned than he’d been.

             25.
The world to which, for better or worse, he once belonged, now gone, 

             26.
he belonged nowhere… 

             27.
To save what could be saved, to salvage what had not been lost,
to punish his failure to master what no other ever had: the boy

             28.
was struck dead & buried

             29.
beside a river, which began again to flow toward the distant mouth 

             30.
out of which, it would finally empty.

They call. They message.

Then the occasional tag on social media.
I am wanting to check in on you… We
are thinking of you… I am so so sorry…

Then                  there                  I go
again                  pounding my head
sifting through thick
                            air
scattering names on a dusty floor

It is morning. It is the afternoon, maybe
the middle of some God-awful hour. I was

calm. I was hunkered low, shades drawn
maybe sipping a tea

                                                    No one
should see me    pacing kitchen

to porch

                                                 to bedroom

grabbing at lint or         shaking my wrist
                    in the mirror

                                                     Don’t call
don’t remind me there are soldiers

tramping on my lawn with gas
                                        and pepper spray.
I’ve just laid the sheets tight in my bed.
I’ve just trimmed the plants.
                                              And you are so white
and fragile with your checking. You are so late
so late so late.

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched. His shadow chased him
from corner store to church
where he offered himself in pieces.

Ask me about the time
my brother disappeared. At 16,
tossed his heartstrings over telephone wire,
dangling for all the rez dogs to feed on.
Bit by bit. The world took chunks of
my brother’s flesh.

Ask me about the first time
we drowned in history. 8 years old
during communion we ate the body of Christ
with palms wide open, not expecting wine to be
poured into our mouths. The bitterness
buried itself in my tongue and my brother
never quite lost his thirst for blood or vanishing
for more days than a shadow could hold.

Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.

Ask me if I can still hear his
exhaled prayers: I am still waiting to be found.
To be found, tell me why there is nothing
more holy than becoming a ghost.

The night air is filled
with the scent of apples,
and the moon is nearly full.

In the next room, Jim
is reading; a small cat sleeps
in the crook of his arm.

The night singers are loud,
proclaiming themselves
every evening until they run

out of nights and die in
the cold, or burrow down into
the mud to dream away the winter.

My office is awash in books
and photographs, and the sepia/pink
sunset stains all its light touches.

I’ve never been a good traveler,
but there are days, like this one,
when I’d pay anything to be in

another country, or standing on
the cold, grey moon, staring back
at the disaster we call our world.

We crave change, but
turn away from it.
We drown in contradictions.

Tonight, I’ll sleep
blanketed in moonlight.
In my dreams, I’ll have

nothing to say about anything
important. I’ll simply live my life,
and let the night singers live theirs,

until all of us are gone.
I won’t say a word, and let
silence speak in my stead.

We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings.

^{for Maya}

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

the falling paper flower

the plastic tree branch

the plight of reminiscing

the bureaucracy of kismet

the factories empty of logic

the bins to hold what’s done

the spaceship of butterflies

the video game of intimacy

the series premiere of strife

the discretion of the cosmos

the sharp wisdom of the young

O friend who reads in a cave w/o light

the comb detangling the scars

forward is not so far away