For Jean Toomer
rhythm’s a badge, beautiful &
mystifying, an inside joke. collapsing
bloodtypes with watery eyes,
couples blanch under this slow grind
this two-step, this islanded house
folks call marriage. moving slowly from
one room to the next; soul
a devastated dwelling caught
in some powerful 9th Ward of feeling.
like shadows that trick us,
caught in abjection’s swift traffic:
old cooking smells, disconcerting bells
fighting the slow wheels of the mind,
its hiss a record spinning, tonearm
a hunger confused with the ambling
gallop of the pinto horse. astride
the sound barrier, bones breaking
like time in a song, its signature
changing, a numbness, a de-
compensation, startling
as the angular blue house, dotted
with the slow, dark cattle call of cause
and effect. realms away a
distant battalion, kit heaped & bound,
propounds a modest physics while
in the immediate vicinity:
black so bright it’s yet to be divorced
from the blockbusters of twitch.
lives spent folding space; trains heading
to all galactic points South. blinded
by dust, what is news but the
mendacity of slavers singing the torch
song of the amnesiac, a sluggishness
of the tongue you’d
have to know to hear
Copyright © 2024 by Herman Beavers. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 12, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.