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Unarcheology of ‘Father’

a Markov Sonnet, with thanks to Fargo Tbakhi

Baba, I held your hand as you were dying
Half-asleep, floating between Unknowing
And here: your gazed fixed into the greying wall.

                        *

Half-asleep, floating away from an unknowable
Here, your gaze was fixed past the wall greying
from hospital to hospice to bedroom to heaven.

                        *

Here, your gaze was fixed. Past the wall, greying
from hospital to hospice to bedroom, the heaven
of your unforgotten youth played out before us.

                        *

From hospital to hospice, from bedroom to heaven,
Your unforgettable youth played out before us: 1967,
Summer whispering in the ferns, gator dead on the mantle.

                        *

You un-forgot your youth and let it play out before
Summer whispered the ferns dead. A gator on the mantel
Meant hunting season was beginning, its heat coming still.

                        *

Summer was a whisper. Ferns, dead on the mantle. A gator
Meant hunting season was a heat you named beginning:
This is how you convinced yourself you were American. 

                        *

I wrote heat, and beginning, but meant hunting season.
This is how I know I am american: I can convince
Other men I am worthy of their roughest entries.

                        *

This is the shape of my knowing: I’m a convincing american
To other men who see, in me, a rough entry. A worthy
Hole would know when to submit, how to say daddy. 

                        *

To other men, I am a rough entry, a worthy
Hole. I know how to submit, call daddy
Undeserving men: all spittle, teeth, and thrashing.

                        *

Hole I once submitted to, Daddy where once
Was undeserving man: in all the spittle and thrashing,
He was my first love, my earliest childhood friend.

                        *

When I was spittle & thrash, I thought myself undeserving
Of him. Being in love with my earliest childhood friend
Was how my body first taught itself to swallow.

                        *

I once was in love with my earliest childhood friend.
This is how my body first learned to swallow
the impossible wound of itself: summer quieted to whisper.

                        *

I first taught my body to swallow itself
As a wound scraped quiet on an impossible summer.
Baba, it was you who held my hand as I was dying.

                        *

I quieted the impossible wound of my body,
Baba. I held your hand while you were dying,
Half-asleep. I let you float off, Unknowing.

Copyright © 2022 by George Abraham. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 29, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by George Abraham

Essay on Submission

Having ebbed in the disbelief of it instead of its weight.

Stone-tiled the floor the blood a trickling fire confessional.  

Here the ocean metaphor refused.

He tore me shut & seeping no vastness. 

To marvel or hide in.

Being told i don’t exist i laugh with wounded teeth into.       

The folds of his larynx a choir of bees rattle me.

Into myth less the mechanics of.      

Throat than the usage the context neither divorced from combustion.

Of birth more or less i forgave him before. 

He entered because he swelled for me i could never trust. 

Myself in his hands but i did want. 

Him. 

Knocking leaning into the sliver of light he.

Missed the wastebasket he couldn’t bear. 

The sight of me i never slept.     

With the lights off i don’t know that. 

History.  

But i named it so it can’t be.      

Holy.

Or rather question.

Of distance my skin.
 
And cold waters my skin and woundless.

Skin i wade in the contradiction. 

After i wanted only to be. 

Held. 

No.

Distance his hand & the small of my.

Back his hand & the lip.   

Of a waterfall here i reject the landscape.

Its vastness i don’t think.

We’re looking for the same thing you. 

And i you’d think olympus.     

Would dethrone itself of goldenrod leaves i told you it was. 

Blood did i claim it.

Mine i am built of avoidable. 

Violences with one drop apocalypse. 

The burning wilderness you can see yourself.

Out now histories like this cannot. 

Be known let alone escaped even the one.

Where i set fire to my colonizer i can afford neither. 

Reclamation nor reconciliation.

No.

Unfragmented i cannot give you an ending. 
   
That isn’t body lunar. 

And concave staining instead. 

The bathroom floor.

Searching for a Palestinian Necropastoral (Eve)

& I found it at the bottom of an american river—& in
the leaves which gathered at its surface’s semblance
of stillness, appearing & not so, as if endless

though counted for, & I found it not in the beams
of light, but how, electric & frantic, they danced beneath 
the water, like a choreography preceding any notion of

body, or unknowable twins returning to the half-self 
they could have never imagined & I found it in that half
-liminal light, divined into fractal’s endless—before split 

& risen, before splay & tempt, before 
womblessness became an american sadness & I found it
in my mother’s breath, her reek of rivers still

enough to pass as reflection & in the smogged 
aftermath of filter & filter &, I found it—there,
yes, there: in the wilderness rotting 

at the center of me—crater of me, tender cesspool 
unaccounted for, unnameable aside from the complacency 
of latex & in the tempt of men I will 

not fable, not legend, or border between. Because I cannot
taint this dark with all the names
they could not give me, the only crown I reach for 

is felled kingdom—this is how I fawn 
the toxic, flora. But is this not the first 
motion, of arriving at a pastoral: to have 

a past to run from? Though the Anthropocene of me
is memoryless as a pathing wind, as prayer’s
barter. Gethsemane of me, I beg of you a fruit

half-bitten & worm writhed—first language, bitter 
prosody of me. This is the only fall my body 
can muster: eclipse of. Lone, knowable 

nightfall. I cannot return to a weightless less american 
than this, the pulled into: body 
                                                    of me. Poisoning eucharist 

of. Take me into the canon’s night & may it be a good, 
good night—& may that night be anything, anything but 
            a mouth—anything                      but a body of—

Related Poems

Black Parade

Coming out isn’t the same as coming to America

except for the welcome parade

put on by ghosts like your granduncle Roy

who came to New York from Panamá in the 50s

and was never heard of again

and by the beautiful gays who died of AIDS in the 80s

whose cases your mother studied

in nursing school. She sent you to the US to become

an “American” and you worry

she’ll blame this country

for making you a “marica,”

a “Mary,” like it might have made your uncle Roy.

The words “America” and “marica” are so similar!

Exchange a few vowels

and turn anyone born in this country

queer. I used to watch Queer as Folk as a kid

and dream of sashaying away

the names bullies called me in high school

for being Black but not black enough, or the kind of black they saw on TV:

black-ish, negro claro, cueco.

It was a predominately white school,

the kind of white the Spanish brought to this continent

when they cozened my ancestors from Africa.

There was no welcome parade for my ancestors back then

so, they made their own procession, called it “carnaval”

and fully loaded the streets with egungun costumes,

holy batá drum rhythms, shouting and screaming in tongues,

and booty dancing in the spirit.

I don’t want to disappear in New York City,

lost in a drag of straightness.

So instead, I proceed

to introduce my mother to my first boyfriend

after I’ve moved her to Texas

and helped make her a citizen.

Living is trafficking through ghosts in a constant march

toward a better life, welcoming the next in line.

Thriving is wining the perreo to soca on the

Noah’s Arc pride parade float, like you’re

the femme bottom in an early aughts gay TV show.

Surviving is (cross-)dressing as an American marica,

until you’re a ‘merica or a ‘murica

and your ancestors see

you’re the king-queen of Mardi Gras,

purple scepter, crown, and krewe.

Closet Space

I know I’m godless when
my thirst converts water                into wasps, my country a carpet
                                                            I finger for crumbs. A country
my grandmother breeds
dogs instead of daughters             because only one can be called
                                                            home. I am trained to lose accents,
to keep a pregnancy
or cancel it out with                       another man. My tongue is
                                                            a twin, one translating
the other’s silence. Here
is my lung’s list of needs:               how to hold water
                                                            like a woman & not
drown. I want men
to stop writing &                            become mothers. I promise this
                                                            is the last time I call my mother
to hear her voice
beside mine. I want                        the privilege of a history
                                                            to hand back unworn
to grow out of
my mother’s touch                         like a dress from
                                                            childhood. Every time
I flirt with girls, I say
I know my way around                   a wound. I say let’s bang
                                                            open like doors, answer to
god. I unpin from
my skin, leave it to                          age in my closet & swing
                                                            from the dark, a wrecking
ball gown. In the closet
urns of ashes:                                   we cremated my grandfather
                                                            on a stovetop, stirred
every nation we tried
to bury him in was                          a war past calling itself
                                                            one. I stay closeted with
him, his scent echoing
in the urn, weeks-old                     ginger & leeks, leaks
                                                            of light where his bones halved
& healed. With small
hands, I puzzled                              him back together. I hid from
                                                            his shadow in closets
his feet like a chicken’s,
jellied bone & meatless.                His favorite food was chicken
                                                            feet, bones shallow in the meat
When he got dementia,
he flirted with my mother              he mouthed for my breasts
                                                            like an infant
We poured milk
into his eyeholes                             until he saw everything
                                                            neck-deep in white
the Chinese color
of mourning, bad                             luck, though the doctor
                                                            says everything is
genetics. I lock myself in
the smallest rooms that fit             in my mind, my grandfather’s:
                                                            a house we hired back from
fire. So I’ll forever
have a mother, I become                a daughter who goes by god. I urn
                                                            my ghosts, know each by a name
my own.

Aria

Tonight at a party we will say farewell
to a close friend’s breasts, top surgery for months
she’s saved for. Bundled close on a back step,
we wave a Bic lighter and burn her bra.
At first struggling to catch nylon aflame,
in awe we watch as all but the sheer black
underwire melts before forming a deep
quiet hole in the snow.

                                      Sometimes the page
too goes quiet, a body that we’ve stopped
speaking with, a chest out of which music
will come if she’s a drum flattened tight, if she’s
a canvas pulled across a frame, a field
where curves don’t show, exhalation without air.
Then this off-pitch soprano steals through.

 

*

 

Then this off-pitch soprano steals through
a crack that’s lit. A scarlet gap between
loose teeth. Interior trill. We’re rustling open.
Out of a prohibited body why
long for melody? Just a thrust of air,
a little space with which to make this thistling
sound, stretch of atmosphere to piss through when
you’re scared shitless. Little sister, the sky
is falling and I don’t mind, I don’t mind,
a line a girl, a prophet half my age,
told me to listen for one summer when
I was gutless, a big-mouthed carp that drank
down liters of algae, silt, fragile shale
while black-winged ospreys plummeted from above.

 

*

 

While black-winged ospreys plummeted from above,
we were born beneath. You know what I mean?
I’ll tell you what the girls who never love
us back taught me: The strain within will tune
the torqued pitch. In 1902 the last
castrato sang “Ave Maria.”
His voice—a bifurcated swell. So pure
a lady screams with ecstasy, Voce
Bianco! Breath control. Hold each note. Extend
the timbre. Pump the chest, that balloon room,
and lift pink lips, chin so soft and beardless,
a flutter, a flourish, a cry stretching beyond
its range, cruising through four octaves, a warbler,
a starling with supernatural restraint.

 

*

 

A starling with supernatural restraint,
a tender glissando on a scratched LP,
his flute could speak catbird and hermit thrush.
It was the year a war occurred or troops
were sent while homicide statistics rose;
I stopped teaching to walk out, my arms linked
to my students’ to show a mayor who didn’t
show. Seven hundred youth leaned on adults
who leaned back. We had lost another life
to a bullet in the Fillmore, Sunnyside,
the Tenderloin. To love without resource
or peace. When words were noise, a jazz cut was steel.
I listened for Dolphy’s pipes in the pitch dark:
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

 

*

 

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead en route to raid.
We meet under cover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can’t tell you. The future restages
the past. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
But the coded trill, a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

 

*

 

Bronchial junction, harmonic jam,
her disco dancing shatters laser light.
Her rock rap screamed through a plastic bullhorn
could save my life. Now trauma is a remix,
a beat played back, a circadian pulse you can’t shake,
inherent in the meter we might speak,
so with accompaniment I choose to heal
at a show where every body that I press against
lip syncs: I’ve got post-binary gender chores . . .
I’ve got to move. Oh, got to move. This box
is least insufferable when I can feel
your anger crystallize a few inches away,
see revolutions in your hips and fists.
I need a crown to have this dance interlude.

 

*

 

I need a crown to have this dance interlude
or more than one. Heating flapjacks you re-
read “Danse Russe,” where a man alone and naked
invents a ballet swinging his shirt around
his head. Today you’re a dandier nude
in argyle socks and not lonely as you
slide down the hall echoing girly tunes
She-bop doo wop . . . an original, domestic
butch. The landlord is looking through
the mini-blinds. Perched on a sycamore,
a yellow-throated warbler measures your
schisms, fault lines, your taciturn vibrato.
Tonight, as one crowd, we will bridge this choir.

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