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the time i dropped your almost body down down to meet the waters under the city and run one with the sewage to the sea what did i know about waters rushing back what did i know about drowning or being drowned you would have been born into winter in the year of the disconnected gas and no car we would have made the thin walk over genesee hill into the canada wind to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands you would have fallen naked as snow into winter if you were here i could tell you these and some other things if i am ever less than a mountain for your definite brothers and sisters let the rivers pour over my head let the sea take me for a spiller of seas let black men call me stranger always for your never named sake
later i’ll say
i spent my life
loving a great man
later
my life will accuse me
of various treasons
not black enough
too black
eyes closed when they should have been open
eyes open when they should have been closed
will accuse me for unborn babies
and dead trees
later
when i defend again and again
with this love
my life will keep silent
listening to
my body breaking
curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black. the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and i taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.
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when i watch you wrapped up like garbage sitting, surrounded by the smell of too old potato peels or when i watch you in your old man's shoes with the little toe cut out sitting, waiting for your mind like next week's grocery i say when i watch you you wet brown bag of a woman who used to be the best looking gal in georgia used to be called the Georgia Rose i stand up through your destruction i stand up