from “Giornata”

Gregory Pardlo

8.
My father Bacchus wanted a daughter instead of me.
He felt the threat a son implies, and took you, my infant
virility, scarf-skin like a halo, angel of my innocence
fore-fledged. Before the ritual, there was guilt. You were
vestigial as the divot where the angel pinched my lips
in binding silence. Would I see myself in style or fit
if I encountered you, my soul, draped like a lost mitten
on a fencepost? Tattered as a moth-eaten turtleneck.
Hood like the hood of a headsman.
If you were re- appended, would you lisp like chiffon
or crunch like corduroy? You are the macho my father’s
dream foretold—he who, in the end, was like a son to me,
whose own member circumscribed a foreshortened life
story mine was intended to resemble. My forebear, the brutal
gardener. He who conjured the corona must have foreseen
his own eclipse, and standing on ceremony, found at hand
a means to get my sex to bleed.

for Jackson Pollack on the bar of the Cedar Tavern: the shot that got spilled after you'd taken several rounds, making the oak bar report your vigor each time with the glass emptied of its mayhem. Before the impulse could travel its course to spark your hand reaching again for the glass, Creeley's clumsy ebullience, bounding to the bar, spilled the bitter dose. As he apologized, you were thinking there's no such thing as accident. A moment ago, you were ready to put a nickel in the Wurlitzer and dance your way back to Easthampton. But now, you took him by the shoulders, gripped him like the bathroom door you once ripped from its hinges because of the mirror on it. You wanted to discipline him, instruct him in the logic of charged particles, make Creeley feel the stray electron as he may have when his eyeball caught pixied windshield as an infant. If you had known that child's long months stifling tears for fear of aggravating the wound, you would have marveled how he stored his grief as you marveled now his standing up to your bully- face. Everyone thought you knew each other, how you looked just then in one another's arms.

Paul Green Of course I know the story of the scorpion and the frog. I've known Biggers all my life. I’ve cast down my buckets where I've stood with them, shoulder to shoulder, our bodies bent like double helices in the fields. And when the mob came for Dick didn’t I sit anyways outside his quarters all night like a jailhouse lawyer, him ignorant of the nature of his custody? It was me who kept the townsmen at bay after he provoked them. My cousin among them had watched him grin and wheedle, consort with white people carelessly, our naïve and guileless women, at the civil gathering where he was my ward. And later, because of me, his offense went unanswered, un-atoned. I know the hearts of men are governed by the endowments of nature. Some children are faithful. Some are made to obey. Charles Leavell First I had to capture the boy in a thicket of print. He tried to make my happy darky dangerous, make my darky an idea that I couldn’t bear to swallow. So I made him a hothouse flower, writing, His hunched shoulders and long, sinewy arms that dangle almost to his knees, but warned readers that Nixon, the "Brick Slayer," as I christened him, had none of the charm of speech or manner that is characteristic of so many southern darkies. I am a gentle man. He is very black—almost pure Negro. Withal, I had to cleave that slate with first words, in order to get at him, get the nature right, and I could almost hear the stone sing like the brick he used to beat the white woman who discovered him, that June day in '38, bagging her Philco radio—as if it were me doing the slaying. Richard Wright One quarter argument two quarters confession. I engender my experience in the characters and they thrive; for the balance I tracked Robert Nixon, so-called "Brick Slayer," through rows and columns, finding him breathing in the margins of the Chicago Tribune. I loved that boy like redemption loves a sinner and saw in him the mute pronouncements of the proletariat, mutiny on the Potemkin. No wonder I was reluctant to ditch the script I wrote with Paul Green, that playwright accused of being a lover of the down- trodden. Much as I wished to avoid controversy, when Welles demanded a Bigger without dream sequences, without singing, for the Broadway production, I sighed relief. I knew I had to protect my creation from the caustic ministrations of Southern sensibility. By North Star or candlelight, by necessity, I had to spirit him away. Robert Nixon More crucial than surveillance in the round house of corrections called a panopticon is the being watched the prisoner faces raising hairs on the ears. Like the sun’s warmth on the back recognized as light, recognized as presence. White noise. The confinement of plain sight. The vertiginous spin siphoning off the will to question, to doubt, g-forces pinning back the cheeks, prisoners reduced to images affixed by the weight of the guard's transparent eyeball the unreasoning stump of muscle itself imprisoned like the figures stenciled on an urn.

Plow-piled snow shrouded in shadow from the abbreviating sun, snow frosted with the exhaust of tour buses. Pigeons shift in congress. Sun glints windshields & chrome like cotton blooms in the monitors. Surveillance here is catholic. From cornices cameras oscillate like raven-heads nestled along palisades. Cameras mind entrances, pedestrians, traffic, the landscape from land's end to Baccarat Boulevard. I tend the security station, notice briefly among these half-dozen screens, a phantom looping through the busy breeze-way & out of view. Unseasonable sparrows mating? Something clutched like a gambler's fist, keening a halo from daylight folded across the corridor like gift-wrap. Little tumbleweed, if you are sparrows, you are bishops of risk wrestling toward pain's bursaries. Jake and angel I believe I could have conjured that woman now entering the asphalt current to protect you. Mira! she might be saying. But she'd be speaking to me. Waving her cashier's apron against traffic, through the street like a banner out to where her good deed is witnessed. Out to where I interpret her behavior as censure. As if the pixels of light depicting the world she is framed in were impastoed by me to the monitor's glass canvass (to be arranged according to the obligation of my anonymous nobility), what good could I do to alter the facts of the world as it hustles around her? What odds do those birds stand to chance anyway? Prevention is akin to greed. Say recovery and a sermon salts the air. Consider the postcards here on the counter beside me. They'll do no more than carry the word of their senders, speak pictures: Jersey's domed capital looks like a junkyard of church bells, a reliquary of Sundays wracked and laid to rest. Noble martyr, Trenton fears no law of diminishing returns, says it "makes, the world takes:" Another prays the next wet pebble be the one that makes a beach. Paydirt. We should be so lucky.

From the Country Notebooks

^{after Brigit Pegeen Kelly}

Once upon a time, my father was offered a shovel
and ten minutes alone with the prized stallion—Just don’t
kill him.    Once upon a time, I asked about the apple-
knotted scar on my father’s back shoulder, as he dressed
for work: That’s from when Sammy tried to kill me.
Remember?    Once upon a time, my father accepted a shovel
and the problem of answering violence without loosing
too much blood from Sammy’s chestnut body, nervous
in the stable.    Once upon a time, I watched my father dare
to ride Sammy, who had only known breeding—: things
went fine, until his muzzle grazed a live wire that sent him
bucking, first with and then without the weight of my father
perched on his saddled back. Every witness there
broke open into a song called laughter.    Once upon a time,
my father couldn’t trust himself to spill just the blood
owed, and so chose torture’s slow ember over a quick-
flamed revenge:—for one long week, Sammy submitted
to the pull of hunger, easing his desire through
the narrow stall bars for a mouthful of sweet oats,
and then the shovel’s handle came down like lightning
across his beautiful face. My father did this
twice each day, despite the wounded wonder delivered
upon both creatures.    Once, Sammy escaped
and it took a lifetime to corral again the full force
of that gallop—to gather back the spirit and grace
of that temporary, hot-hearted freedom.

II.

My mother said I should not do it,
but all night I turned the horses loose.
The farmhouse slept, the coyotes hunted noisily.
I was a boy then, my chest its own field flowered by restlessness.
How many ropes to corral a herd?
I had none but a stubborn concern with steady hands
and the darkness of the summer wind which moved right through me
the way the coyotes moved through the woods with voices
that seemed to mourn the moonlit limits of this release
and those who had prayed for release before me.
I pulled each horse through the opened barn doors,
all night out into the pasture with little resistance, all night my hands
buried in manes as if I were descending into a new understanding,
all night my path a way toward recovery.
And then carrying its own kind of clemency, against
the tall forest of sharp pines, the morning came,
and inside me was the deep-pitched presence a howl builds
at the lonely center of its bawl, before the throat
remembers again that other sweet mercy, silence.
The light climbed into the pasture.
The coyotes were crying and then were not.
And the pasture was—I could see as I led
the last warm body to field—full of memory and motion.

Geffrey Davis

2019

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from “Giornata”

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