Maybe the Saddest Thing
Page 2
Interrupting Aubade Ending in Epiphany
Could I call this poem an aubade if I wrapped it
in fragrant tissue paper? If I locked this morning
in the mind’s safe-deposit box and polished it
sixty-six times per day, until a sky’s description noted
the number of feathers on a sparrow’s left wing
and the crabgrass jutting from his uppity beak?
I once wrote a poem about a fruit fly orgy
in a grape’s belly. Its crescendoed combustion
was supposed to represent the speaker’s feelings
for a wife named Joy. That poem never really
worked out. This poem is aware of its mistakes
and doesn’t care. This poem wants to be a poem
so bad, it’ll show you a young, smitten pair
poised in an S on a downy bed. The man inhales
the woman’s sweet hair and whole fields
of honeysuckle and jasmine bloom inside him.
He inhabits a breath like an anodyne and I think
I could call this poem an aubade if it detailed
new breath departing his mouth. I think I could
get away with that. Because who knows what
that even means? Maybe I mean
that’s safer than saying it straight
like, This is about the woman I’ll marry.
How one summer, she hit snooze four times
each sunrise. This is about her smiling
and nodding off, and smiling, and listening
to me mumble into the back of her perfect
freckled shoulder about anything but poetry.
And this morning at my desk, in the midst
of a breath, I remember not every moment
needs naming. I know precisely what to call this.
Everything I Know About Jazz I Learned from Kenny G
All right, so not really. But the morning my pops found Kenny G lying on my nightstand I did learn a black father can and will enter a bedroom, only to find Kenny’s CD, bad perm and all, cuddled too close to his eighth-grader’s head. He will tiptoe from the room, turn the knob, then kick down the door in slippers. He’ll drag the boy out of bed down two flights of stairs and toss him in front of a turntable. Listen here, he says. When you finish a record put it back in the sleeve and you better not scratch my shit.
I curl into a ball on our shag brown carpet and stare at his wall of LPs. Breakfast folds into lunch before I move an inch. When supper rolls around I am shaking. (This is how jazz begins. Out of hunger.) Getting to my feet, I pull a record from the shelf, read: Black Talk! Charles Earland. A needle collides into an empty groove and out sweats a funky wash of organ. It feels like the afro’s voice, grinning from the record sleeve, has picked itself out in my gut.
Eric Dolphy squeals, leaps, and dives inside my abdomen. Roy Ayers kneads and vibrates my chest. Freddie Hubbard’s wail could crack glass, my ribs. Pharoah Sanders shivers all over my face. Every wax-gash, knick, and hiss. Every cut. Every record pierces skin. I tap. I drone. I thrash. I scream. I listen to the Freedom Now Suite. It sounds like a welted voice wincing at the basement’s night. A voice my father hears too.
He does not cave the basement door. He walks a dirge down those steps. Gently strokes my neck. Asks, Why are you crying, son? Dad, I ache. Because I’ve been down here forever.
Self-Dialogue Camping at Yellowwood State Forest
Driving east on 45
Red & white pines / resemble neat rows
Of nooses / hung from navy sky / knotting
All / the oxygen surrounding your frame.
Can even one of ten friends see / you struggle
For space inside / a gutted speck of forest?
Does anyone notice / the way trees shrink
Breath inside / your tiny throat?
Someone sees / makes a joke about death
That lashes your spine / with cold / pimpled fear.
Nightfall chatters in space / between lips
& your stomach / is stuffed with white teeth.
The next morning smells of quelled fire.
The next morning sings deliverance.
To a White Friend Who Wonders Why I Don’t Spend More Time Pontificating the N Word
What do you want me to say?
When I’m riding shotgun in a shiny Escalade—
black speck stuck to a frat-white interior.
When rap parts automatic windows—
becomes integration’s dangerous sound track.
When every mouth in the whip but mine spits
the score’s every n word–note—I get all warm
& fuzzy inside! I feel acutely American.
Remember that Sunday at the AME church?
You belted “Lift Every Voice & Sing”
like it was yours—carried the choir
when the second verse dropped. I pledged
allegiance to the background—swayed
in silence with the lively congregation.
After service, you polished off two plates
of collards, sucked neck bone marrow.
I piled on potato salad. Stuck to cottage cheese.
Do you recall how hard rain
drenched everything that night
on the curb outside of our dorm?
We passed Paul Masson while I cursed
Christy Carmichael’s parents. Told you
how I’d sat in their kitchen, pretending
to admire flag-heavy furnishings. Imitated
the exact pitch of their laughs
after Christy said I was her tutor
for Early Western Civ. (I laughed then.
Now, I’m chuckling in a different hue—
shaking my head at that
crack about feeling American.)
They asked if I knew “gangbangers.”
Had cousins in prison. Bullet-riddled kin.
I wept while telling you this. & you held me
until I stopped. Matt, you know the score.
You must think I’m some sort of wigger.
Wanna know if me & the word are acquainted.
Wanna know why I won’t say it in front of you.
You want me to share it, old friend.
But you could never be my nigga.
You don’t have what it takes.
Love Letter to Bruce Leroy
You every-single-syllable-articulating, left-his-mojo-in-the-dojo,
proper-posture-having, overzealous, no-break-dancing chump.
You unseasoned shrimp-fried, chivalrous sucka.
You pelvically challenged or something?
You Rubik’s Cube.
You couldn’t learn Cool if it came with an illustrated manual.
You eat soul food with chopsticks.
You black Orient. You occidental Africa.
You would rather kiss a man’s Converse than sport a pair.
You thought that Cuban Link–choked, shiny-suited Harlem
Shogun came straight out of a comic book. & you were right.
You mastered the art of using a black belt as a belt.
You talk in riddles: Search for art in everything. In fortune cookies.
You find empty fortune cookies like life: containers
fitting for your art.
You have reached the final level: when the mind becomes the self
that guides without archetypal help.
I bet you keep LeRoi & Levis on the same bookshelf.
1998
Maybe it’s the half
communion wafer
yellow moon in my eye.
Maybe it’s the thug wind
mingling fragrant herb
firing shots
across a synapse
that takes me back
to summer. Outkast.
“Return of the ‘G.’”
I was a bone, head
caught between middle
& high, private & public
school. Me & B.
used to run the drain
in his father’s fifths of Crown.
Used to do C-sections
on Swisher Sweets, talk shit
about Rodney’s chipmunk
teeth. & deep down
I must have been aching
to knock one out. Me & B.
were rocking back & forth
on plastic porch chairs
when Ypsi’s no. 1 gossip
approached. Sheila said
Rodney was talking reckless
about my younger brother.
I inhaled a pulsing red fist
from the midsection, blew
smoke through bull nostrils,
knew exactly what to do.
We placed a few calls.
Told every teen on the block
they should come to the park
around noon. I grabbed
my pigskin, set teams
of five. B. snapped
a short bullet pass
to Rodney &
five guys nailed his back
to the grass; rained down
sharp laughs & elbows
to ribs. Teed off
on his groin.
I tried to drill a hole in his face.
Blasted my knuckles
against his incisors
again & again & again. &
I can’t go on talking
to you this way
any longer. All this time
I’ve been working up
to say something about
that liminal place between
manhood & cartoon-
cool. Something stupid
like that. Rodney,
I chased you through
cul-de-sacs & lawns. Chased
you west through the state
of Michigan. & still haven’t
figured out how to finish
this letter. I just want
you to know. & I understand
this is no consolation. But—
every time I’m in the heat
of a huddle. In a gym or
barbershop. When I swig
cold brews & watch
mob flicks by myself—
Rodney, you chase after me.
You kick my ass.
You nail me square
to the ground.
Self-Dialogue Staring at a Mirror
You see yourself in pastels, neatly groomed
Tossing a Frisbee in a college brochure.
Puberty was kind to your pores.
Three Bambi-esque beauty marks
Punctuate your baby face.
What you want is a box cutter’s calling card
Stapled to your cheek. Brass knuckle–serrated
Jawlines. Tiny Band-Aids over gashed eyelids.
Most days you wash in the sink, head slumped,
Refusing a smudge-free reflection.
Today you lean hard into that bathroom mirror
& your blank, brown face
Becomes the image of an image, pixilated.
You see a man who pees standing up.
I remember the scene in that movie
when the brown jock uprooted from the Bronx
beats his teacher at literary charades. Flared nose
pointing toward a ceiling, the teacher cants dense
lines of verse, of which the homie always knows the authors.
What you may recall is the kid’s Scottish mentor
sauntering into an assembly, squashing plagiarism allegations
and saving the brown jock from expulsion.
You’re probably thinking this is about white men.
About gold-encrusted measuring sticks. How in the world
outside that movie, those men could pass for twins. You’re right
I was wrong. Their game, like a literary “name that tune.”
Guess which dead white dude poet wrote this. Wrong
again. Do you figure a brown jock from the Bronx
could grasp geometry behind an arc or pool cue?
From whom or what does he learn dead white dude poets?
Here I am, stumped about whose brother I be. I think
the teacher was gaming. I think the jock was just playing,
but then, how does one finesse canon?
Some Revisions
for Raleigh Lee
My friend Raleigh always jokes
You must know every black guy
in Bloomington, Indiana
because I break my neck to nod
when one crosses our path, as if
to say: It’s good to see myself
for the first time again. As if
to say: It’s good to see you.
Let me start over.
Riding the campus bus with Raleigh
one day, my head lifted from its ledge
and landed at the feet of a mannequin
who peered straight through me.
And that’s just what I thought too:
He’s a mannequin black man; sitting there
all stiff in his cowboy boots and straight-leg
Levi’s. He’s a mannequin black man.
Too stilted to acknowledge himself
when he sees me. And by that I meant:
Too stilted to acknowledge me.
One more time.
So I’m in transit when I see this brotha
across the aisle with his near-brown,
green-eyed son. And just as he looks
at me. No, just as he turns away
a twang or drawl betrays his lips.
He is not speaking to me.
He’s talking, smiling at an old white
moth of a woman, well, wasp
if you consider her dilated pupils.
And all of a sudden I pretend
his affliction is not my own.
This isn’t working, is it?
Raleigh. Brother. When you asked
Is it difficult to write about race?
I meant to say Hell yes. Yes.
Especially if you’re stilted. Like me.
I find it much safer to sit at home
and feign an understanding. But
to write race is to stare firm. I suppose
you knew that.
You meant Push me
to write about race. To re-see.
And I didn’t know enough then
to advise you. Well,
I may have learned something
one keystroke ago.
Race is a triangular maze
of lush green hedges that stretch
beyond the eye’s reach.
Black as I am. Yellow as you are.
As neither as this town is,
it has taken a poem: a bus,
tearing through that maze,
full speed in my direction
for me to look at you and nod.
Yes. I meant to say
Write it. And please,
don’t stop.
Love Letter to Dave Chappelle
Dear Dave,
Discovery’s turned on. I am watching
sheets of ghastly, squirming, horny termites
gnawing inside a wall and missing you.
Today marks my twelfth stab at this.
Each time I begin to say something real
I collapse. Shortcomings. You understand.
This is not the one about the black comedian.
Or his fear of the toddler
pushing Kush on an ave. in the a.m.
This is not about the moment after
that joke. When the audience
slump, just a smidgen, in their seats.
When they question your position
on the ghetto’s flowchart
or reconsider a weed dealer’s
average age. And when they laugh—
well, this does not concern that.
This isn’t a poem
about some cowboy c
racking up
over a blackface skit. How his cackle
sounded like a bigot’s brain
lodged inside a beating heart, thinking
out loud. This is not about that sound
imploding the logic for your craft.
Not about you leaving me hoarse
and lonely on Wednesday nights.
I repeat. This is not a love thing.
Not even a little.
Jazz Musicians
for Vince, Dean & Josef
The bass player does not matter. Nor
his right index—plucking
a note so deep dead skin ricochets
from a fat steel string to a woman’s
crystal glass of Grigio. No. It doesn’t
matter. The trombone player’s lips split
clench & swell each dark hair
on my left big toe. No matter the alto
saxophonist’s other life. That this
gig saves us both tonight. The banquet hall
is chock-full of entomologists scouring
the joint for hors d’oeuvres. The room
talks too loud to hear the fat chewed
between drummer and boy wonder
on the Rhodes. But based on their
clamp-toothed grins, I think swine. Greasy
tough & filling. Death-driving.
The band’s name: Urban Transport.
Bus systems drive sane men
batty. The wash of blank stares. All those
ant mandibles sculpting sanctuaries
from sand, inside sidewalk cracks beneath
street signs. Stop. After stop-stagnant. How
Granddad saw a jazzman’s life. In 1962
he made my eighth-grader pops trek 27 blocks
to a dive pawnshop, double bass strapped
to his back. Claimed it a bad bloodline.
Likely hocked for heroin. Said the future in jazz
was an early exit to an underground room.
Now my father riffs
most days in the cellar with me, crooning eloquent
about voting Independent to make