71. Realizing Lucy

- 1970-

At the top of the hill, before the light gives way to the pine
     that fractures across the sky,
and the farmhouse, opens its door to shadow, there is a
     signal.

It is not the dead bird, lying out flat and face down in the
     middle of the street, its brown
belly on the pavement, cooled by the wind.

It is not in my chest, which opens up into sections as I
     breathe in the air that almost
shocks me into falling face down as I climb the hill.

It is not the breath. It is not the sky, which I haven’t looked
     at, staring up at the
mountains, which spreads down through the range up the
     curve.

It is not my knee, which seems at any moment will collapse
     into if nothing else,
the breaking beneath my legs, the final moment I push up,
     towards the end of the light.

There are shadows which cover the sign: SUN, painted in
     blue at the peak of the hill.
So, where, today, will I direct my anger?

Where will I turn, running past the women, who hover up
     the road, no cars,
crawling into their beers in the middle of the day?

Fat and White. I refuse to grow any fatter, or to not tan.     
     This summer,
I burn off another self, sprinting up the high hill of my own
     making,

burning Kcals toward the peak of my own release. In this
     face, “What a view?”—
someone asking another. Was I supposed to seek
     something else into which to slip?

Post-Dissertation-Intervention (i.)


I always tell my dancers. You are not defined by your fingertips, or the top of your head, or the 
bottom of your feet. You are defined by you. You are the expanse. You are the infinity. 

—Judith Jameson
 

Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior writes about beauty, and how black artists 
resist monstrousness by their own self-definitions.  

I’m interested in this repair, too, but find comfort in the ugly.  I love monsters.
We both consider Brooks.  In the poem, “The Life of Lincoln West,” when Elizabeth 

hones in on two white men describing little, black Lincoln, specie, I zip to the poem’s 
end, to what I read as Lincoln’s release: “it comforts him to be the real thing.” 

I align after June Jordan, whom am I when pinched, patted, and bent?
Get behind her defense of Black English in On Call: How can I be who I am?

We do with what’s given.  I suppose, I may not share viewpoints, but still, 
I connect.  Of prose, Meena Alexander says she uses it to clear the underbrush 

to make space for the poem.  Vacate fields, ropes, a body.  Don’t hate on Elizabeth. 
Do you.  Frame how she pairs Brooks with Lawrence and Bearden.  

To argue, she opens walls, and living rooms.  So, you like death?  Is your project 
Fanon’s?  Is this all a setup?  Fan  – on – it was a jolt in perception, then.

Pieces of this, repeat.  Toni Morrison, where she writes: the remains of what were left
behind to reconstruct the world these remains imply.

Ties to Brooks’s litany of the black body that endures, a stream of violent verbs
to enter, under buzz and rows of halogen: burned, bricked, roped to trees, and bound.

Now, what contexts shift in the stacks that glare before you?  And how do you return,
after, to what seized Brooks at Fisk, standing to face all those Blacks?  

ED ASNER

“...style...”

Grind me Nautica, Vic Tayback.
Line chef para Alice arm hair,
fore-sausage & anchor tat,
snatch, a silvered chest, V-
neck, sleep hard Weezy—
Zebra-Jive-Turkey.

As in how do you do that?
Glimpse, a tad, pecking
the surface glaze, or Dove
Men+Care. iNot be puppy breath,
tan streak down the cheek, scar,
or Bowie’s bass: VANILLA ICE 

tricks a pompadour. Jim Carrey
a detour, when slips the tongue.
Airborne pellet in seltzer fizz. ED— 
father had a junk business...barrels 
of jimmied pistols...they wouldn’t fire 
...but they were good for kids.

UPON Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, 2021. / DOUBLE SONNET after A.J., C.S.D., C.G., J.B., D.R., P.C., M.B., K.G., K.W., M.E., K.B., E.G., M.D. & R.S.

for Okwui Enwezor

Firehose blast pummels. Torqued silhouettes.
Teach me how to Dougie…We don’t succumb.
Everything that stood in their way…ruthless
destruction…for which tool brazen Diamond

hammers back against murder. Article:
Philando’s fiancé booked. Our assault
maps. Bradford’s built paper, string tactical 
veins pulse in black crumples. Forearms—Baller

K.G. (Celtics) seizes, spits. Gouache, white ink,
magenta mouth-stung light. Walker: We tried… 
Not venom, neurotoxins. Vomit pink—
Is it? Our exhaustion translates: We tried…

Bubble hoodie. Helmet-to-weave, No Rem,
M.E., welded steel: Lynch Fragments for them.   

Art mines, solders, bleeds. Angles as expect
orate to its hyphae. Roots—in Hyper 
cardioid and contact—mics—Dew, Pigment.  
Beasley and Gallagher sinew lines, curve 

sensorium as polyurethane  
query: optic vertebrate, lexicon. 
Translucent human-gut spores. Body planes
used in the hi order for…your drill…Drum

Bits…/ntial…ad…FREE WORKSHOP will…i
of America…now…PUT YOUR HANDS UP 
AGAINST THE WALL! The building is on Fiiyy
yAAHH…got my 3 kids, and we bounced…Smoke rup

tures Alien’s proboscis…They don’ know 
They don’ know…Pixels—blues, violet shadows.

Related Poems

My Skeleton

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.

And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis—
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.

What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.

—2013