all roads began to lead
to these tables
these hungry children
this time
and
I am become Death the destroyer of worlds.
■
the times
it is hard to remain human on a day
when birds perch weeping
in the trees and the squirrel eyes
do not look away but the dog ones do
in pity.
another child has killed a child
and i catch myself relieved that they are
white and i might understand except
that i am tired of understanding.
if this
alphabet could speak its own tongue
it would be all symbol surely;
the cat would hunch across the long table
and that would mean time is catching up,
and the spindle fish would run to ground
and that would mean the end is coming
and the grains of dust would gather themselves
along the streets and spell out:
these too are your children this too is your child
■
dialysis
after the cancer, the kidneys
refused to continue.
they closed their thousand eyes.
blood fountains from the blind man’s
arm and decorates the tile today.
somebody mops it up.
the woman who is over ninety
cries for her mother. if our dead
were here they would save us.
we are not supposed to hate
the dialysis unit. we are not
supposed to hate the universe.
this is not supposed to happen to me.
after the cancer the body refused
to lose any more. even the poisons
were claimed and kept
until they threatened to destroy
the heart they loved. in my dream
a house is burning.
something crawls out of the fire
cleansed and purified.
in my dream i call it light.
after the cancer i was so grateful
to be alive. i am alive and furious.
Blessed be even this?
■
libation
north carolina, 1999
i offer to this ground,
this gin.
i imagine an old man
crying here
out of the overseer’s sight,
pushing his tongue
through where a tooth
would be if he were whole.
the space aches
where his tooth would be,
where his land would be, his
house his wife his son
his beautiful daughter.
he wipes his sorrow from
his cheek, then
puts his thirsty finger
to his thirsty tongue
and licks the salt.
i call a name that
could be his.
this offering
is for you old man;
this salty ground,
this gin.
■
jasper texas 1998
for j. byrd
i am a man’s head hunched in the road.
i was chosen to speak by the members
of my body. the arm as it pulled away
pointed toward me, the hand opened once
and was gone.
why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?
the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it.
the townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust. i am done.
■
alabama 9/15/63
Have you heard the one about
the shivering lives,
the never to be borne daughters and sons,
the one about Cynthia and Carole and Denise and Addie
Mae?
Have you heard the one about
the four little birds
shattered into skylarks in the white
light of Birmingham?
Have you heard how the skylarks,
known for their music,
swooped into heaven, how the sunday
morning strains shook the piano, how the blast
is still too bright to hear them play?
■
praise song
to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.
i was ten. i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.
■
august
for laine
what would we give,
my sister,
to roll our weak
and foolish brother
back onto his bed,
to face him with his sins
and blame him
for them?
what would we give
to fuss with him again,
he who clasped his hands
as if in prayer and melted
to our mother? what
would we give
to smile and staple him
back into our arms,
our honey boy, our sam,
not clean, not sober, not
better than he was, but
oh, at least, alive?
■
study the masters
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.
■
birthday 1999
it is late. the train
that is coming is
closer. a woman can hear it
in her fingers, in her knees,
in the space where her uterus
was. the platform feels
filled with people
but she sees no one else.
she can almost hear the
bright train eye.
she can almost touch the cracked
seat labeled lucille.
someone should be with her.
someone should undress her
stroke her one more time
and the train
keeps coming closer.
it is a dream i am having
more and more and more.
■
grief
begin with the pain
of the grass
that bore the weight
of adam,
his broken rib mending
into eve,
imagine
the origina
l bleeding,
adam moaning
and the lamentation of grass.
from that garden,
through fields of lost
and found, to now, to here,
to grief for the upright
animal, to grief for the
horizontal world.
pause then for the human
animal in its coat
of many colors. pause
for the myth of america.
pause for the myth
of america.
and pause for the girl
with twelve fingers
who never learned to cry enough
for anything that mattered,
not enough for the fear,
not enough for the loss,
not enough for the history,
not enough
for the disregarded planet.
not enough for the grass.
then end in the garden of regret
with time’s bell tolling grief
and pain,
grief for the grass
that is older than adam,
grief for what is born human,
grief for what is not.
■
the gift
there was a woman who hit her head
and ever after she could see the sharp
wing of things blues and greens
radiating from the body of her sister
her mother her friends when she felt
in her eyes the yellow sting
of her mothers dying she trembled
but did not speak her bent brain
stilled her tongue so that her life
became flash after flash of silence
bright as flame she is gone now
her head knocked again against a door
that opened for her only
i saw her last in a plain box smiling
behind her sewn eyes there were hints
of purple and crimson and gold
■
out of body
(mama)
the words
they fade
i sift
toward other languages
you must listen
with your hands
with the twist ends
of your hair
that leaf
pick up
the sharp green stem
try to feel me feel you
i am saying I still love you
i am saying
i am trying to say
i am trying to say
from my mouth
but baby there is no
mouth
■
oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.
I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
■
april
bird and bird
over the thawing river
circling parker
waving his horn
in the air above the osprey’s
nest my child
smiling her I know something
smile their birthday
is coming they are trying
to be forty they will fail
they will fall
each from a different year
into the river into the bay
into an ocean of marvelous things
■
children
they are right, the poet mother
carries her wolf in her heart,
wailing at pain yet suckling it like
romulus and remus. this now.
how will I forgive myself
for trying to bear the weight of this
and trying to bear the weight also
of writing the poem
about this?
■
surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
and the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar,
poems about nature and landscape
surely but whenever i begin
“the trees wave their knotted branches
and …” why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?
■
mulberry fields
they thought the field was wasting
and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and
piled them into a barn they say that the rocks were shaped
some of them scratched with triangles and other forms they
must have been trying to invent some new language they say
the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and
some few were used for the state house
crops refused to grow
i say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity
and pointed toward the river i say that after that collection
no pillow in the big house dreamed i say that somewhere under
here moulders one called alice whose great grandson is old now
too and refuses to talk about slavery i say that at the
masters table only one plate is set for supper i say no seed
can flourish on this ground once planted then forsaken wild
berries warm a field of bones
bloom how you must i say
■
cancer
the first time the dreaded word
bangs against your eyes so that
you think you must have heard it but
what you know is that the room
is twisting crimson on its hinge
and all the other people there are dolls
watching from their dollhouse chairs
the second time you hear a swoosh as if
your heart has fallen down a well
and shivers in the water there
trying to not drown
the third time and you are so tired
so tired and you nod your head
and smile and walk away from
the angel uniforms the blood
machines and you enter the nearest
movie house and stand in the last aisle
staring at the screen with your living eyes
■
in the mirror
an only breast
leans against her chest wall
mourning she is suspended
in a sob between t and e and a and r
and the gash ghost of her sister
t and e and a and r
it is pronounced like crying
it is pronounced like
being torn away
it is pronounced like trying to re
member the shape of an unsafe life
■
blood
here in this ordinary house
a girl is pressing a scarf
against her bleeding body
this is happening now
she will continue for over
thirty years emptying and
filling sistering the moon
on its wild ride
men will march to games and wars
pursuing the bright red scarf
of courage heroes every moon
some will die while every moon
blood will enter this ordinary room
this ordinary girl will learn
to live with it
■
/>
walking the blind dog
for wsm
then he walks the blind dog muku
named for the dark of the moon
out to the park where she can smell
the other dogs and hear their
yips their puppy dreams
her one remaining eye is star lit
though it has no sight and
in its bright blue crater
is a vision of the world
old travelers who feel the way from here
to there and back again
who follow through the deep
grass the ruff of breeze
rustling her black coat his white hair
both of them
poets
trusting the blind road home
■
hands
the snips of finger
fell from the sterile bowl
into my mind and after that
whatever i was taught they would
point toward a different learning
which i followed
i could no more ignore
the totems of my tribe
than i could close my eyes
against the light flaring
behind what has been called
the world
look hold these regulated hands
against the sky
see how they were born to more
than bone see how their shadow
steadies what i remain whole
alive twelvefingered
■
wind on the st. marys river
january 2002
it is the elders trying to return
sensing the coast is near and they
will soon be home again
they have walked under two oceans
and too many seas
the nap of their silver hair whipping
as the wind sings out to them
this way this way
and they come rising steadily not
swimming exactly toward shore
toward redemption
but the wind dies down
and they sigh and still and descend
while we watch from our porches
not remembering their names not calling out
Jeremiah Fanny Lou Geronimo but only
white caps on the water look white caps
■
the tale the shepherds tell the sheep
that some will rise
How to Carry Water Page 9
