I am liberated and focused today
on what it means to govern myself.

I am not watching the news
or wearing a bra.

I will not question America
or ask where it was last night.

I went to bed with a cold fact
With no cuddling, after.

Today, God I want nothing
not even the love I have been praying for.

On the train, I won’t offer
anyone my seat.

No one ever moves for me
Some days, not even the wind.

Today, I will be like the flag
that never waves.

At work, I will be black
and I will act like it.

They will mispronounce my name
And this time I won’t answer.

I will sit at my desk with my legs open
and my mind crossed.

Sometimes, I hear my house speaking
to me in small bangs, a crack here,
a crack there, sixteen years,
the stairs have got steeper, longer,
higher, or my knees have
            given in to my years that were
splintered along these looming hills.

This Pennsylvania landscape of uneven
spaces, like ghosts coming out of new
walls, these things that inhabit a home
before we sign away our lives
at the Broker’s office.
            These ghosts that followed
us after we fled the war, the war dead

we passed along Liberia’s roadways
in search of refuge, those clinging ghosts
of the dead from Soul Clinic rubber
bush Displaced Refugee Center, where
rebels executed tens of thousands
            of our own kinsfolk, mothers, fathers,
friends, neighbors, children,
whole families. Ghosts, clinging

forever, to us, as we fled, visiting, following
after all these years, to live where we
would live, like Ruth to Naomi,
   “Entreat me not to leave you,
or to turn back from following after you;
for wherever you go, I will go;
and wherever you lodge, I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people,
and your God, my God,” your country
will be my country, where you die,
we will die, again, and again, like they
killed us, we will die a million times,
buried with you, and as long as you live,
we will live, forever and forever.

Golgotha is a mountain, a purple mound
Almost out of sight.
One night they hanged two thieves there,
And another man.
Some women wept heavily that night;
Their tears are flowing still. They have made a river;
Once it covered me.
Then the people went away and left Golgotha
Deserted.
Oh, I’ve seen many mountains:
Pale purple mountains melting in the evening mists and blurring on the borders of the sky.
I climbed old Shasta and chilled my hands in its summer snows.
I rested in the shadow of Popocatepetl and it whispered to me of daring prowess.
I looked upon the Pyrenees and felt the zest of warm exotic nights.
I slept at the foot of Fujiyama and dreamed of legend and of death.
And I’ve seen other mountains rising from the wistful moors like the breasts of a slender maiden.
Who knows the mystery of mountains!
Some of them are awful, others are just lonely.

                                   *        *        *

Italy has its Rome and California has San Francisco,
All covered with mountains.
Some think these mountains grew
Like ant hills
Or sand dunes.
That might be so––
I wonder what started them all!
Babylon is a mountain
And so is Ninevah,
With grass growing on them;
Palaces and hanging gardens started them.
I wonder what is under the hills
In Mexico
And Japan!
There are mountains in Africa too.
Treasure is buried there:
Gold and precious stones
And moulded glory.
Lush grass is growing there
Sinking before the wind.
Black men are bowing.
Naked in that grass
Digging with their fingers.
I am one of them:
Those mountains should be ours.
It would be great
To touch the pieces of glory with our hands.
These mute unhappy hills,
Bowed down with broken backs,
Speak often one to another:
“A day is as a year,” they cry,
“And a thousand years as one day.”
We watched the caravan
That bore our queen to the courts of Solomon;
And when the first slave traders came
We bowed our hands.
“Oh, Brothers, it is not long!
Dust shall yet devour the stones
But we shall be here when they are gone.”
Mountains are rising all around me.
Some are so small they are not seen;
Others are large.
All of them get big in time and people forget
What started them at first.
Oh the world is covered with mountains!
Beneath each one there is something buried:
Some pile of wreckage that started it there.
Mountains are lonely and some are awful.

                                   *        *        *

One day I will crumble.
They’ll cover my heap with dirt and that will make a mountain.
I think it will be Golgotha.

black keys from trees white keys locked

on black shoulders locked together above

skeleton ribs keys to 45 keyboards from one

tusk the word ivory rang through the air

one tusk + one slave to carry it bought

together if slave survived the long march

sold for spice or sugar plantations if not

replaced by other slaves five Africans died

for each tusk 2 million for 400,000 American

pianos including the one my grandmother

played not to mention grieving villages

burned women children left to die the dead

elephants whose tusks went to Connecticut

where they were cut bleached and polished

while my grandmother played in Illinois

my mother played and I— there were many old

pianos and slaves were used till the 20th century:

an African slave could have carried a tusk

that was cut into white keys I played, starting

with middle C and going up and down

                  1)
The work goes here:
                               Judas recedes, lines realign, Christopher Smart
loved God through his cat, George Herbert with words in shapes,
and Jacopo Robusto detto Tintoretto through feats of geometry and oils.
He painted The Footwashing for one church wall; seen from the end of the gallery
as if walking up the church side aisle, perspective corrects and sweeps
and Jesus, sleeves rolled like the butcher or tanner, comes foreground,
kneeling to wash between Peter’s toes. But it goes wrong for me
when it goes right. I like the parts. The front and center retraction
of the neat story. That’s where, at the Prado, we stood,
looked right to see Jesus reverse his typical blessing gesture,
pointing down at a foot. Turned our heads to decide
the disciples, who tumbled on the tiles to wrestle stuck britches
off each other’s scrawny legs, were soused. Ewer. Cloak.
Foreground hound of modest yet elegant mien, curling paws.
At the communal table, bleary guy in drizzling beard listens
to the other guy’s moral disputations. And, magically simultaneous
in the back side room, like a detail box in a news graphic,
drawing us closer and closer to the big event,
tiny Last Supper. While close to the water on the main stage,
a weary apostle slumps against a pillar, halo kindled, fiddlingly
counts on his fingers or rehearses devotions or maybe tries to write gospel
with thumb on palm, forgetting he doesn’t have ink or an inkling.
And all this goes down each scene unfolding in its own separate cell.
You or I used to say, finding Judas in narrative paintings
is like Where’s Waldo, takes awhile but once you see you can’t unsee him.
I or you said, to find Judas in New Testament crowd scenes, look for the coin purse.
Tintoretto’s Judas looms far left, unlacing a sandal, adjunct to the parable,
going along with Jesus’s latest Jesus-show, money pouch half concealed
in one of his hands, body hooked like his nose, standard bit
of seventeenth-century Venetian-style Jew-hate. Kneecap like a bowl of mashed potatoes.
I get too close, lose the thread, grab at whatever lets me lose the point.
Digression, said Calvino, is for putting off the ending…perpetual evasion or flight.
Flight from what? From death of course….
                                                           The seeing all the way to the paint
as paint and the paint in pieces, in lumps, streaks and in ridges.
Judas is bald but for a haze of stubble, as if the hair had been burnt away.

                  2)
It turns out ashes are very light and heavier than I expected—turns out
others have noticed this: About the weight, they say, surely horseshit,
you were at birth. As if as ashes you’ve corrected back.
I wish you could read this poem and tell me what’s too, how to correct
or de-correct correction. Before you died, when you couldn’t help or move yourself,
I lifted you a lot, began to feel your weight as other than what I knew before,
other ways with your body. And lost my earlier knowing—
                                                                                             one of the cats
(about the weight of your ashes) interrupts, springing
on the keys of the open piano, depresses two high notes. Carrying you now,
it’s like I carry the part of yourself you can’t anymore. A heavy best bearing,
marriage, to under- and misunderstand. I slide you under the bed.
The girl, softly: “I don’t want to see it.” Fourteen now,
she said take out her confidential news I put in an earlier draft. I tell you this way!
And turn my laptop to position the painting as if on the church wall,
to see it the right way, as if without you, I must return to correctness.

                  3)
Imagining, next year, standing in Madrid, one of our favorite places:
El Prado, hall of the Tintoretto, long walk to the painting’s edge,
thence to center and the dispassionate dog. A chocolate or maybe lunchtime sherry taste
in my mouth, a portion of your ashes in my purse. Leaving a bit of you somewhere,
nowhere some jumpsuited worker could sweep you up, maybe nearby
in the Park of the Good Rest by the Big Pond where we drank coffee upon coffee
and read and wrote, watching children yell and play, plotted
bringing our future girl with us, or on the steps to mingle with the sandaled feet
of people you wanted to sketch, with their iPhones and belly-packs
stuffed with cash, cards, passports, tissues and tampons.
You liked those jumpsuits, bought one in a shop. Back home in your study,
typing in your cobalt bright jumpsuit, the throat unzipped
so gray chest hairs curled out at the placket, you were cross
when it was going well, apologized for your crossness, cross again.

Through the portico the sky roils lapis over San Marcuola—
he set the scene at home, not Jerusalem—see the canal with gondola
and gondolier. Crocks and bread and beards. We did take the baby to Venice.
Some Poles said: “Tsk! too young to travel.” A local: “Tsk, why no shoes, feet so cold,”
rubbing the baby’s feet to warm them. I got sick. The squid in the restaurant.
Padua was better. The Lamentation in the chapel. Sin biting her own face.
Bad Judas lifting face to kiss the Man in the Garden, bank of bystanders
waving a thicket of spikes, tableau of saint-heads served on golden dishes.
I had an infection, needed to pee, the body always making its demands,
you sketching the widows at Petrocchi where a bullet from an uprising
lodged in the wall. How cheerful they seemed! the widows, you noticed.
You liked them—and the currants in the market—
and always—I digress from digressing—you liked an uprising.

                  4)

                                            Your body in the room after you went—
your last an exhale. Basins, pillows, tubes. Holding your hand I turned my head
to be polite to the nurse who came in just then—me being pointlessly polite
made you impatient—that’s when you died. As if—I see, by this perspective,
myself self-absolve and self-condemn, over and over, no resolution
or correction—that was our whole life the last six months—
as if by turning, I turned the key to unlock you from yourself.
Then I waited for the social worker—tiny, plump, hard-charging—
good because I froze. I was supposed to have made plans for your body,
had left it though they told me not to, for you weren’t dead yet
when you were only dying. Waiting for her I was glad to have you
(I felt it was still you) there with me, giving me the comfort, as always,
of your company, bearing the weight of me, glad you were there
when she came hurrying in, the social worker, as if late—to what?
and got crematoriums on speaker, helplessly laughing with me helplessly laughing
at the donkey-braying drunk funeral director who said to come with you
to make sure the right body went to her ovens, and couldn’t for even two minutes
remember my name or yours, a skill that surely would come in handy
when selling the bereaved a burning. (You’d also have liked
when I told Siri-in-my-phone to remind me, that she noted down
Pick up asses at 3:30 in Upper Darby.) But when that was done,
after all it wasn’t you, and though I’d kissed you (dead)
an hour earlier, now I couldn’t kiss you.
                                                                 Turning my laptop, thinking of life
with you, can’t see it well, waking and walking and dream. Too close.
Not close. An accumulation of adjacent details. We were always standing
irresolute (me), resolute (you), in our lives’ center, actions garbling to episode.
Judas at the proper angle makes a story make sense. A proper angle
washes a thing. Like marriage at its best. A proper villain’s useful to going on.
Then my own dirt. A way to love. Shall I make a show of it.
Shall I wash my hands of it. Tell me—you’d know, you’d see it easy—
where the work goes. Where to stand to see it.

Can we just stay here in the space where our loud laughing
won’t disturb the mausoleum of St. Peter, three times denying
the purple iris, can we hobble the horses to the hitching post
in front of the post office and let everything fall out of where
we put it to be delivered, can we call the night choir of crickets
down here to make the road home sing while the lightning bugs
show us the way to a happy wages of sin so then we will not dare
cry when the trumpet hits the high note of getting up in the                       morning,
going back to be counted by the straw bosses, and to count them,
making note of how sure this Earth is, this world of work we                       define
ourselves, as long as we know it will need us, as long as guarantees
paint themselves against the invisible ley lines pulling mountains
together, summoning snow caps in California over the broad                       brown
hills laying up to hear God’s whims like fallen but contented                       angels.