here among them  the dead  the others  the aliens
I see you without    coke bottle glasses   a wavy comb over 
your nose buried inside a notebook  over-

flowing with strange sightings   men and women
without a homeland   a library to shelve histories
dreams   the names of rare flowers  fruits  baby names

exiled from their villages   learning to say hello
with accents thick   with nostalgia   for their purple planets
here UFO sightings aren’t so spectacular

border crossing is quintessentially american  universal
crowds gather in squalid ghettoes where every country is a city
every city is a verse  & every verse echoes “Those Winter
     Sundays”

where a New World opens up where all the martians are
     welcome 
at the writing table with their fountain pens & swollen digits &
     you whispering

what took so long?
 

A young black girl stopped by the woods,
so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow
but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister.
The woods were his and she respected his boundaries
even in the absences of fence.
Of course she delighted in the filling up
of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness,
to being taken at face value.
This face, her face eternally the brown
of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass,
cling to bark making it seem indecisive
about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism.
With the grass covered, black and white are the only options,
polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral
but are on edge.
She shakes off snow, defiance wasted
on the limited audience of horse.
The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to,
as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight.
She has promises to keep,
the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise that she ride the horse only as long
as it is willing to accept riders,
the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow,
and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover
more than the distance from black to white
before she sleeps with Jim.