Poems of Terrance Hayes

“A. Machine”

Hey, I am learning what it means to ride condemned.I may be breaking up. I am doing 85 outside the kingdom

Of heaven, under the overpass and passed over,The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer

Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess-Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist

And mystery, maybe trooper bait with the ambulanceAmbling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a band-

Age of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore, A pupil of motion on my way to be buried or planted or

Crammed or creamed, treading light and water or tread and trepidation, maybe. Hey, I am backfiring along a road

Through the future, I am alive skidding on the tongue, When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone?

“Anchor Head”

Because keyless and clueless, because trampled in gunpowder and hoof-printed address,

from Australopithecus or Adam’s boogaloo to birdsong and what the bird boogaloos to,

because I was waiting to break these legs free, one to each shore, to be head-dressed in sweat,

my work, a form of rhythm like the first sex, like the damage of death and distance

and depression, of troubled instances and blind instruction, of pleasure and placelessness,

because I was off key and careless and learning through leaning, because I was astral and pitchforked

and packaged to a dim bungalow of burden and if not burden, the dim boredom of no song,

I became a salt-worn dream- anchor, I leapt overboard and shackle and sailed through

my reflection on down to ruin, calling out to you, and then calling out no more.

“Arbor for Butch”

a pecha kucha after Martin Puryear

[VESSEL] I am with my newborn son and the man blood says is my father in a shit motel and if each of us is, as I sometimes believe, the room we inhabit, he is a bed used until it’s stained. Even if I knew this first meeting was our last, I would have nothing to offer beyond the life I have made without him.

[THICKET] In the far south where history shades everything, there are people who fear trees. I once heard an old man say I may be black as a crow but I’m white inside. Nowhere else does the sky do what the sky does there where the graves are filled with dirt the color of fire.

[RAWHIDE CONE] We drank whiskey until we were drunk as the couple in the photo my mother gave me to show him, the boy and girl swaying at the edge of my future. I watched my father curl on the bed like a leaf drained of its greening as my child cried the way rain cries when it is changed to steam.

[BOWER] Because I believe the tree is a symbol of everything, one of us was the bough reaching across the road as fumes scorch its leaves. One of us was a door opening and closing in the darkness, one of us was a boat being carried downstream.

[MAROON] My father and I sat in a motel room beside a highway Where his pickup was the shade of a bruise beneath the glow of the vacancy sign. Where he and his talk began to evaporate. We were two fathers watching the faces of two sons where the evening passed as it arrived.

[LADDER FOR BOOKER T. WASHINGTON] Where the rain comes, long toed and crushing the high grass, swamping the land, where a slave talked his children out of running away with the bottom of his shoe. This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.

[SANCTUARY] In the far south where sap jewels the bark, the teeth of the saws are sticky and bittersweet. But I wanted to carve a door out of the wood and around that door I wanted to build a room because I knew what my mother wished for and I knew from far off what she would need.

[C.F.A.O.] The arm of the boy falls around the girl heavy as a branch in the photograph with the gloss that’s been rubbed clean and the blurred inscription which nearly delivers its message before vanishing. I drove the long night to see the face my son and I wear like a mask.

[SELF] Where history can be a downpour of joy or guilt spilling its wronged headed desire all over the body. Where a boy and girl fought in a motel bed to make me, one desire beating against another. Where my mother seemed to blur calling him her first lover even after she said she was raped.

[BELIEVER] In the far south my father, the first time I met him where for that night and the next one, he’d sleep,

said God made nothing sweeter than pussy. We smoked our history, we drank to our future until each of us was a head of steam, clouds above each other’s dreams.

[DOWAGER] Where the plan was when I saw him to cut off his hands. Where because of this man my mother would want me dead, would want no limbs to branch inside her, no cluster of sound waiting in a drum. Where she wanted to, but could not shape her want into an ax.

[DEADEYE] Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what you identify, I thought This is how the blood sings into the self. I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music.

[BIG AND LITTLE SAME] The first time I met my father I believed I would understand the line connecting me to him because a man rooted to his kin can never be a slave. But he was like the road, skid marked and distant, like the rain breaking above ground and beating into it.

[SOME TALES] In the far south where as one man swung from the limb Of a tree, he said I may be as black as this bark but my heart is light. Where even when your lantern burns out, they say the flame lasts. Where everyone I know is ablaze with this story and darkened by its ash.

[RELIQUARY ] Certain arrangements must be made if you want access to the past. With his room without rooms and his truck without gas, my father was a nail bent in the shaft of a hammer, a wound the length of a kiss, a mouth bled of its power.

[CIRCUMBENT] I am with the ones the blood says are mine and if each of us is as I sometimes believe, little more than a bray of nostalgia, we are like the village mule chained to its muling. My father fit a slim ragged hand over the head of my newborn son and said he sounds like a white child crying like that.

[MALEDICTION] What if blackness is a fad? Dear Negritude, I live as you live waiting to be better than I am. Before sleep last night I thought how it would be to awaken with all the colors of this world turned inside out. And that was the name of my suffering.

[BASK] The story my father told me did not reveal one body inside another, the arms of the boy who would become my father embracing the girl who would become my mother, it did not hold the sentence rooted to the beginning of my life.

[OLD MOLE] I am not doing anything now, except waiting like the bird who uses the bones and feathers of other birds to build its nest. I am on my bed of leaves thinking about the past, how my father dragged his shadow across the room the way a storm drags its rain. (stanza break)

[CONFESSIONAL] Where there were too many trees and too many names etched into the trunks, where the knots in the wood Were the scars of old limbs, where, to be reborn, the birch pine must be set aflame, where the door if I opened it might have Revealed the love making or abuse still waiting to be named.

“At Pegasus”

They are like those crazy women who tore Orpheus when he refused to sing,

these men grinding in the strobe & black lights of Pegasus. All shadow & sound.

"I'm just here for the music," I tell the man who asks me to the floor. But I have held

a boy on my back before. Curtis & I used to leap

barefoot into the creek; dance

among maggots & piss, beer bottles & tadpoles slippery as sperm;

we used to pull off our shirts, & slap music into our skin. He wouldn't know me now

at the edge of these lovers' gyre, glitter & steam, fire, bodies blurred sexless

by the music's spinning light. A young man slips his thumb into the mouth of an old one,

& I am not that far away. The whole scene raw & delicate as Curtis's foot gashed

on a sunken bottle shard. They press hip to hip, each breathless as a boy

carrying a friend on his back. The foot swelling green as the sewage in that creek.

We never went back. But I remember his weight better than I remember

my first kiss. These men know something I used to know.

How could I not find them beautiful, the way they dive & spill into each other,

the way the dance floor takes them,

wet & holy in its mouth.

“The Blue Terrance”

If you subtract the minor losses,you can return to your childhood too:the blackboard chalked with crosses,

the math teacher's toe ring. Youcan be the black boy not even the buck-toothed girls took a liking to:

the match box, these bones in their funkmachine, this thumb worn smoothas the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump.

Thump. Everything I hold takes root.I remember what the world was like beforeI heard the tide humping the shore smooth,

and the lyrics asking: How long has your doorbeen closed? I remember a garter belt wrunglike a snake around a thigh in the shadows

of a wedding gown before it was flungout into the bluest part of the night.Suppose you were nothing but a song

in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipesweat from the brow of a righteous woman,but all you owned was a dirty rag? That's why

the blues will never go out of fashion:their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves ofconsequence; that's why when they call, Boy, you're in

trouble. Especially if you love as I lovefalling to the earth. Especially if you're a little bithigh strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love

watching the sky regret nothing but itsself, though only my lover knows it to be so,and only after watching me sit

and stare off past Heaven. I love the word Nofor its prudence, but I love the romanticwho submits finally to sex in a burning row-

house more. That's why nothing's more romanticthan working your teeth through the muscle. Nothing's more romantic

than the way good love can take leave of you.That's why I'm so doggone lonesome, Baby,yes, I'm lonesome and I'm blue.

“Candied Yams”

3 boiled whole yams unpeeled and sliced,into a saucepan1 stick melted butter2 big tablespoons nutmeg¼ teaspoon cinnamon2 tablespoons lemon juice1 cup brown sugar

1 brown-sugar womanquietly slices yamsat a wicker table.She does not meltinto the ruckus ofa rumbling house.2 boys who never stopto listen.Listen. Listen.She gives each1 brown yam toppedwith marshmallows;gives each a lovefor the impossible;for the majestyof soul food;a lovefor remembering.

I want to writesomething about that:the saucepan’s infinite scent,the dip & tenor of tablespoons,the brown hands blackerthan these scratches I make.I want to write somethingabout my mother’s yams;I want to make magicmagic.

“Carp Poem”

After I have parked below the spray paint caked in the granitegrooves of the Fredrick Douglass Middle School sign

where men and women sized children loiter like shadowsdraped in the outsized denim, jerseys, bangles, braids, and boots

that mean I am no longer young, after I have made my wayto the New Orleans Parish Jail down the block

where the black prison guard wearing the same wearinessmy prison guard father wears buzzes me in,

I follow his pistol and shield along each corridor trying not to lookat the black men boxed and bunked around me

until I reach the tiny classroom where two dozen black boys aredressed in jumpsuits orange as the pond full of carp I saw once in Japan,

so many fat snaggle-toothed fish ganged in and lurching for foodthat a lightweight tourist could have crossed the pond on their backs

so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread to drop into the waterbelow his footsteps which I’m thinking is how Jesus must have walked

on the lake that day, the crackers and wafer crumbs fallingfrom the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was the one fish

so hungry it leapt up his sleeve that he later miraculously changedinto a narrow loaf of bread, something that could stick to a believer’s ribs,

and don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer too, in the power of food at least,having seen a footbridge of carp packed gill to gill, packed tighter

than a room of boy prisoners wanting to talk poetry with a young black poet,packed so close they might have eaten each other had there been nothing else to eat.

“Cocktails With Orpheus”

After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stoodNaked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcee who ownedA gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did

Not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she foundA good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and A house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word

Decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus handsMe his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mindI am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound

As touch permits, saying don’t forget me when I become the liquidOut of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made.

I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a foldOf pleas released, but I am a black wound, what’s left of the deed.

“Derrick Poem (The Lost World)”

I take my $, buy a pair of very bright kicks for the gameat the bottom of the hill on Tuesday w / Tone who averages19.4 points a game, & told me about this spot, & this salesmanw / gold ringed fingers fitting a $100 dollar NBA Air Avengerover the white part of me–my sock, my heel & sole,though I tell him Avengers are too flashy & buy blue & whiteAir Flights w / the dough I was suppose to use to paythe light bill & worse, use the change to buy an EllaFitzgerald CD at Jerrys, then take them both in a bagpast salesmen & pedestrians to the C where there is a girlI'd marry if I was Pablo Neruda & after 3, 4 blocks, I spill outhumming "April in Paris" while a lady w / a 12 inch cigarcalls the driver a facist cuz he won't let her smoke on the bus& skinny Derrick rolls up in a borrowed Pontiac w / roomfor me, my kicks & Ella on his way to see The Lost World

alone & though I think the title could mean something else,I give him some skin & remember the last time I saw himI was on the B-ball court after dark w / a white girlwho'd borrowed my shorts & the only other person outwas Derrick throwing a Spalding at the crooked rimno one usually shoots at while I tried not to look his way& thought how we used to talk about black women& desire & how I was betraying him then creeping outafter sundown with a girl in my shorts & white skinthat slept around me the 5 or 6 weeks before she got tiredof late night hoop lessons & hiding out in my cribthere at the top of the hill Derrick drove up still talking,not about black girls, but dinosaurs which if I was listeningcould have been talk about loneliness, but I wasn't,even when he said, "We should go to the movies sometime,"& stopped.

“God is an American”

I still love words. When we make love in the morning, your skin damp from a shower, the day calms.Shadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering of adulthood, the powdered sugar on a black shirt. I am

alone now on the top floor pulled by obsession, the inkon my fingers. And sometimes it is a difficult name.Sometimes it is like the world before America, the kin-ship of fools and hunters, the children, the dazed dream

of mothers with no style. A word can be the boot printin a square of fresh cement and the glaze of morning.Your response to my kiss is I have a cavity. I am in love with incompletion. I am clinging to your moorings.

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survivesalright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.

“Howyoubeens”

Mostly people talk to people, holdingOn to lingo bits in the gone hoursOf Monday. You see them meanderingWords while the calendar tilts and poursIts steady juice of minutes. You see them

On Forbes almost vaporish, almost stupidTo newspaper’s steady whip; to trash binsGluttoned with watchheads, switchblades, red-lipped

Cups, obituary ink. Lost letters,Teeth of despair, relics of the moment:Everythings ignored in the name of Weather,Or somebody’s business & “Howyoubeens.”

I too am guilty, chattling after strangers,Wasting it. Dumb. Whining about the wind.

“Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.This hour, for example, would be like all the otherswere it not for the rain falling through the roof.I'd better not be too explicit. My night is carelesswith itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no brain winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlightdrips from the leaves. You can spend your whole lifedoing no more than preparing for life and thinking."Is this all there is?" Thus, I am here where poets cometo drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllablesof debris. I know all words come from preexisting wordsand divide until our pronouncements develop selves.The small dog barking at the darkness has something to sayabout the way we live. I'd rather have what my daddy calls"skrimp." He says "discrete" and means the streetjust out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:that's poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangementof derangements; I'll eat you to live: that's poetry.I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read usMolly Bloom's soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,sometimes I taste her caution. But let's not talk about that.Maybe Art's only purpose is to preserve the Self.Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft firesupon an alien ship whose intention is the destructionof the earth. Other times I fall in love with a wordlike somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.

All species have a notion of emptiness, and yetthe flowers don't quit opening. I am carrying the whimperyou can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdomof monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pitiesthe rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nightsout on a limb, there's a chance you'll fall in your sleep.

“Mystic Bounce”

Even if you love the racket of ascension,you must know how the power leaves you.And at this pitch who has time for meditation?the sea walled in by buildings. I do missthe quiet, don’t you? When I said, “Fuck the deerantlered and hitheredin fur,” it was becauseI had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist.If I were in charge, I would know how to fixthe world: free health care or free physicals,at least, and an abiding love for the abstract.When I said, “All of history is saved for us,”it was because I scorned the emancipated sky.Does the anthem choke you up? When I askedGod if anyone born to slaves would diea slave, He said: “Sure as a rock descendinga hillside.” That’s why I’m not a Christian.

“New Folk”

I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.After “We acoustic banjo disciples!” Jebediah said, “Whenand whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good temperscome to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?”We stole my Uncle Windchime’s minivan, penned a simpleballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the endof the chitlin’ circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in templewhere our new folk was not that new, but strengthenedby our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulleda parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents.We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled

in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriendsfirst because beneath our twangor slept what I’ll calla hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me whensisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin woolthen, and placed my hand over the guitar string’s wind-ow til it stilled. “When the moon’s black,” I said. “Be faithful.”

“New York Poem”

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatownone can see the sci-fi bridges and aislesof buildings where there are more milesof shortcuts and alternative takes thanthere are Miles Davis alternative takes.There is a white girl who looks hi-jacked with feeling in her glittering jacketand her boots that look made of dinosaurskin and R is saying to her I love youagain and again. On a Chinatown rooftopin New York anything can happen.Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty wordfor “slaughterhouse.” Someone saysmermaids are just fish ladies. I am sofucking vain I cannot believe anyoneis threatened by me. In New Yorknot everyone is forgiven. Dear New York,dear girl with a bar code tattooedon the side of your face, and everyonewriting poems about and inside and outsidethe subways, dear people undergroundin New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aislesof New York, on the rooftops of Chinatownwhere Miles Davis is pumping in,and someone is telling me about the contranyms,how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same wordlooking in opposite directions. I now know“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.That’s how I think of New York. Someonejonesing for Grace Jones at the party,and someone jonesing for grace.

“Ode to Big Trend”

Pretty soon the Negroes were looking to get paid.

My partner, Big Trend, wiped his ox neck and said

He wasn’t going to wait too much longer. YouKnow that look your daddy gets before he whups you?

That’s how Big Trend looked. There was a pink scarMeddling his forehead. Most people assumed a bear

Like him couldn’t read anything but a dollar,But I’d watched him tour the used bookstoreIn town and seen him napping so I knew he held more

Than power in those hands. They could tearA Bible in two. Sometimes on the walk home I’d hear

Him reciting poems. But come Friday, he was the oneThe fellas asked to speak to the boss. He’d go alone,

Usually, and left behind, we imagined the boss buckledInto Trend’s shadow because our money always followed.

“Pittsburgh Is”

A large woman gabbing at the bus stop.She mistakes me for someone who gives a damn,For a native son of her gray industrial breast.She blesses her Bucs, her Steelers,Her father, God rest his soul, was a Penguins fan.She mistakes me for someone who gives a damn,Her blue scarf twisting like the mad Monongahela,Her blue face lined like a jitney’s street map.I’d tell her I’m not from this place;These severed grumpy neighborhoods,These ruthless winter tantrums,But her long-winded stories have numbed me.She is persistent as snow, as boot slush & Thinsulate,As buses rumbling like great, metallic caterpillars.She lights a cigarette & it means:Spring will burn quick & furious as a match,Summer will blaze.She tells me, Nobody’s a stranger in Pittsburgh.

And maybe I believe her,My frosty, fairy, foster-Mamma,My stout, blabbering metaphor.

“Roots”

My parents would have had me believe there was no such thing as racethere in the wild backyard, our knees blackwith store-bought grass and dirt, black as the soil of pastures or of orchardsgrown above graves. We clawed freethe stones and filled their beds with soiland covered the soil with sodas if we owned the earth. We worked into the edge of darkness and rose in the edge of darknessuntil everything came from the dirt. We clawed free the moss and brambles, the colonies of crab-weed, the thornspatrolling stems and I liked it then:the mute duty that tightened my parents’backs as if they meant to workthe devil from his den. Rock and spore and scraps of leaf; wild bouquets withered in bags by the road, cast from the ground we broke. We scrubbed the patio,we raked the cross hatch of pine needles, we soaked the ant-cathedrals in gas. I found an axe blade beneath an untamed hedge, its too dull to sever vine and half expected to find a jawbone scabbed with mud, because no one told me what happened to the whites who’d owned the house. No one spoke of the color that curled around our tools or of the neighborswho knew our name before we knew theirs.Sometimes they were almost visible, clean as fence posts in porch light;

their houses burning with wonder, their hammocks drunk with wind. When I dreamed, I dreamed of themand believed they dreamed of usand believed we were made of dirt or shadows:something not held or given, irredeemable, inexact, all of us asking what it means to be black . . .I have never wanted another life, but I know the story of pursuit: the dream of a gate standing open, a grill and folding chairs, a new yard boxed with light.

“Shafro”

Now that my afro's as big as Shaft's I feel a little better about myself. How it warms my bullet-head in Winter,

black halo, frizzy hat of hair. Shaft knew what a crown his was, an orb compared to the bush

on the woman sleeping next to him. (There was always a woman sleeping next to him. I keep thinking,

If I'd only talk to strangers. . . grow a more perfect head of hair.) His afro was a crown.

Bullet after barreling bullet, fist-fights & car chases, three movies & a brief TV series,

never one muffled strand, never dampened by sweat-- I sweat in even the least heroic of situations.

I'm sure you won't believe this, but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?

Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff. I'm sweating even as I tell you this,

I'm not cool,

I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,I'm a small American frog.I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.

“Snow for Wallace Stevens”

No one living a snowed-in lifecan sleep without a blindfold.Light is the lion that comes down to drink.I know tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunkholds nearly the same sound as a bottle.Drink and drank and drunk-a-drunk-drunk,light is the lion that comes down.This song is for the wise man who avengesby building his city in snow.For his decorations in a nigger cemetery.How, with pipes of winterlining his cognition, does someone learnto bring a sentence to its knees?Who is not more than his limitations?Who is not the blood in a wine barreland the wine as well? I too, having lost faithin language, have placed my faith in language.Thus, I have a capacity for love withoutforgiveness. This song is for my foe,the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patronof Hartford, the emperor of whitenessblue as a body made of snow.

“Support the Troops”

I’m sorry I will not be able to support any soldiers

at this time. I have a family and a house with slanting floors.

There is a merciless dampness in the basement,a broken toilet, and several of the windows are painted shut.

I do not pretend my dread is anything like the dreadof men at war. Had I smaller feet, I would have gladly enlisted

myself. In fact, I come from a long line of military men.My grandfather died heroically in 1965, though his medals have been

lost. I try to serve my country by killing houseflies. I am fullyaware of their usefulness, especially in matters of decay.Napoleon’s surgeon general, Baron Dominique Larrey,

reported during france’s 1829 campaignin Syria that certain species of fly only consumed

what was already dead and had a generally positive effect on wounds.When my grandfather was found,

his corpse shimmered in maggots free of disease. As you cantell, I know a little something about civilization.

I realize that when you said “Freedom,” you were talkingabout the meat we kill for, the head of the enemy leaking

in the bushes, how all of it makes peace possible.Without firearms I know most violence would be impractical.

And thank you for enclosing photos and biographical informationof soldiers who might suit my household. I am sure any one

of them would be an excellent guardian of my family.I admit I have no capacity for rifles or gadgetry.I cannot use rulers accurately.

I have not been able to drive off the flies. I can seethat they all have teeth that are the very masticates of democracy

and I thank you for noting the one with a talentfor making the eagle tattooed across his back rear its talons.I realize my support comes with a year long subscription

to the gentleman’s magazine of my choice.I realize were it not for the sacrifices of these young boys,

America would no longer have its sourceof power. I have given considerable thought to youroffer, but at this time, I simply am unable to offer my support.

“Wind in a Box (after Lorca)”

I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanketof leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice.I want to learn to walk without blinking.

I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father,the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions

and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hillcan return after sleeping each season, I want to walkout of this house wearing nothing but wind.

I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with youweighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts

of gray lighting the alcoves and winding pathsof your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgingsof snow. I want to fight off the wind.

I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the windwith its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging

screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphletsof noise. I want to fight off the dull straight linesof two by fours and endings, your disapprovals,

your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies.If the locust can abandon its suit,

I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s furyand the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtueof the evening rain, but not its gossip.

I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions.I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter

every room in a strange electrified cityand find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh

at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror,but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch.I do not want to be the yellow photograph

or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman,I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song.

“Wind in a Box (one)”

This ink. This name. This blood. Thisblunder.This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind.This canyon.This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow

bloomingan inch above the carpet—. This cry. Thismud.This shudder. This is where I stood: by the

bed,by the door, by the window, in the night /in the night.How deep, how often / must a women by

touched?How deep, how often, have I been touched?On the bone, on the shoulder, on the brow,on the knuckle:Touch like a last name, touch like a wetmatch.Touch like an empty shoe and an emptyshoe, sweetand incomprehensible. This ink. Thisname. This bloodand wonder. This box. This body in a box.This bloodin the body. This wind in the blood.

“Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)”

When I consider the much discussed dilemmaof the African-American, I think not of the diasporicmiddle passing, unchained, juke, jock, and jivingsons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poetsand tether fisted Nationalists commonly call MotherAfrica, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the childof a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish-American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist.I forgot all my father's warnings about meeting womenat bus stops (which is the way he met my mother)when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in Octoberbecause I have always been a sucker for deep blue denimand Afros and because she spoke so slowlywhen she asked the time. I wrote my phone numberin the back of the book of poems I had and saidsomething like "You can return it when I see you again"which has to be one of my top two or three bestpickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten luckyon a first date you can guess what followed: her smiletwizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatteron my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothingbut shoes. When I think of African-American ritualsof love, I think not of young, made-up unwed motherswho seek warmth in the arms of any brotherwith arms because they never knew their fathers(though that could describe my mother), but of that girland me in the basement of her father's four story Victorianmaking love among the fresh blood and axeand chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughterexecuted by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest (his facewas starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy Americanpoppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofersbecause that's the closest I've ever come to anythingremotely ritualistic or African, for that matter.We were quiet enough to hear their chatterbetween the drums and the scraping of their chairsat the table above us and the footsteps of anyoneapproaching the basement door and it madeour business sweeter, though I'll admit I wonderedif I'd be cursed for making love under her father's noseor if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell.I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightenedand bewildered, but when I consider the African-AmericanI think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed

by madness or that we were assigned some lousy fatewhen God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Timeor that we were too dumb to run the other waywhen we saw the wide white sails of the shipssince given the absurd history of the world, everyoneis a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonderif outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?).I think of the girl's bark colored, bi-continental nippleswhen I consider the African-American.I think of a string of people connected one to anotherand including the two of us there in the basementlinked by a hyphen filled with blood;linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.