I hear you
Outside my winter studio
Moaning in the alley below my bedroom window
Calling for god the machine of all magics
All spells written on our bodies
All the right incense of rank summer
The flowers breaking through the confusion

You speak for all of us
By that I mean me
You speak for me myself and I
This morning tomorrow’s and
My midnight always now, moan for me
I moan full bridge
Field of lavender
The bridge to Olosega
White sand road and men’s voices
Beneath the road flows the sea between two islands
Lavender stream
The spirits of the sea
My lovers

you have since swallowed
so much blood, the sailboats
rap violently about the docks,
and how heavy the gulls’ wings
have grown, how sour, sourly
beloved, and what shall we then
call it, this consternation, a blue
funk, some pestilence, which hangs
or blooms or paints itself silently
within the many courtyards
of the body, or across that high
court of the skull, what looms
like another steamrolled peony,
or some pink paper moon.

Summer nights cool came down

blotting heat like a kiss for colored children.

Heat surged

as we danced jagged up and down the street,

played hide and seek.

Last night, night before

Twenty-four robbers

at my door.

I got up

let em in

Hit em in the head

with a rollin pin.

All hid? Among the leaves

of church hedges

we smelled

something slow and splendid

in our sweat.

Our fathers we knew worked good

jobs that required muscle.

Our mothers in day work

used elbow grease and unwritten receipts

for smothered chicken and gravy,

caused white women to envy and delight.

Outside mothers waited for aid checks

and a long gone man; large women

on folding chairs

ate chunks of Argo starch.

Lean days, sugar sandwiches,

ketchup, or mayonnaise.

Missing meat a vague notion.

Love, manna.

Twilight, blessed the block,

poured from a dark man’s mouth

like a spout of Joe Louis milk,

our champion toast

heralding the greatest’s arrival

however long the getting there.

Slow rocking grandmothers

spit out words into small cans

held in their hands.

Their eyes trained on us

from Deep South porches

we never left behind.

Never left us.

Even after Exodus.

Mouths wide open, we drank

the evening’s pleasures.

Men, women who loved us more

than we could have known.

We were their quick, flashing hope-

                                              treasures.

The memory of us

Their milk.     Their honey.

^{translated from the Japanese by William George Aston}

The cry of the cicada

Gives us no sign

That presently it will die.

love between us is
speech and breath. loving you is
a long river running.

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath;
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their cress ’gainst a sky green-gold;
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.

  I have just seen a most beautiful thing,

                     Slim and still,

              Against a gold, gold sky,

              A straight black cypress,

                     Sensitive,

                     Exquisite,

                     A black finger

                     Pointing upwards.

Why, beautiful still finger, are you black?

And why are you pointing upwards?

Little grey dreams,
I sit at the ocean’s edge,
At the grey ocean’s edge, 
With you in my lap.

I launch you, one by one,
    And one by one,
      Little grey dreams,
Under the grey, grey, clouds,
Out on the grey, grey, sea, 
You go sailing away, 
From my empty lap,
      Little grey dreams.

Sailing! Sailing!
Into the black,
At the horizon’s edge.

On the way to water, I think, low
moan, heat too deep for me

to reach. A new noise
from a vent in the paper palace. Before,

I bounce off brick
wall, begging for a change;

the door swings open and unhinges
me to the nail. I heard ssssSMH behind me;

you not ready. As it turns out, ticks,
like cops, have a taste for black blood.

The mosquitos made a meal of me
for weeks—their walking Slurpee.

One stuck his straw in my third eye. I spell
him struck blind. My friends compile lists

of things they never knew, read me
for filth. I say in every language, I don’t have

the answers. They don’t believe me.
I stop buying tickets to the shit

show, but no matter the distance,
the smell is pervasive. In the woods,

I learned baby wolves get high
from the scent of hearts bursting

on their Instagram feeds. Serotonin
is a helluva drug. In the clearing, I strain

to hear the echoes of men whose bodies
drag the forest floor. Unfortunately, all

the witnesses withered seventy winters ago.
Blood is a potent fertilizer.

I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, 
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth; 
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found earth’s breath so keen and cold; 
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, 
And laid them away in a box of gold.

The play room’s alphabet pattern padding could be pulled apart, then

repositioned; after snack, the older, all-day boys—who tore off,

one by one, the turtles’ shells, a hippo’s quiet heft, and fed

the bashful ones their heads—huddled around their stockpile of

letters and laid out a dirty word that made the other kids

giggle or gasp and Miss Margaret tap the backs of their hands with

the yellow wooden yardstick. I couldn’t read yet.

I wouldn’t talk, either;

                              my language was the felt

flowers in the clear plastic tub, at the back table by the window, which

looked out at the slide, glistening like a tongue in

the brash noon light. An older boy stole

my poppy, so I assembled a pansy, pre-cut

by Miss Margaret at her house after school. I imagined her

pouring over a private abundance 

of patterned scissors for the jaggedness of a lily’s leaf, then the sturdy

kitchen shears for a pile of rose petals. Years later, she’d return beneath

the tangled top sheet of dreams, and before I could smooth

the intrusion in me, a muscle-drenched arm—veins like a textbook’s

anatomical orchid, dense hair

like my father had—guided her two fingers farther

into the scissor’s doubled gape—

                                                  Blistering then in the fully-bloomed heat,

the swings seemed to rock, but within themselves, the way

a lightbulb, untouched for years, holds a spasm

in its tungsten, a self-possessed momentum, awaiting fingers

on the switch. A group of girls, that day, trudged over, 

at Miss Margaret’s insistence, barrettes wincing above their ears, 

the button I’d cut from my best Sunday dress a makeshift bud 

atop a glue glob smear. They asked me if I wanted

to play house. I set my pink felt down.

                                              I didn’t know I could be the father, so

I said I’d be the dog. They named me Princess. One girl put on

an apron, white plastic pearls. Two others, fabric dolls in hand,

the daughters. One adhered

                                    a costume mustache and a voice

absurdly low. We arranged the mats by color for the rooms in our

make-believe home. I played my part; I laid in the yard, 

on the green pieces, the letters, an F, an A. My job, I’d decided, was not

to bound into the room, pretend-panting at my family’s feet,

with the whimper

                         dogs give when they want to be loved, but—

watching Miss Margaret tend to the bullies, our tiny table set, 

the family complete, curled up in

my own constant obstinate heat—to guard my made-up post,

on the bladeless lawn, alone, even if anyone called my name.