Honest Engine

by Kyle Dargan

a clay-colored colt stomps, its hooves

  cursing the barn’s chronic lean.

  In your America, blood pulses

  within the fields, slow-poaching a mill saw’s

  buried flesh. In my America, my father

  awakens again thankful that my face

  is not the face returning his glare

  from above eleven o’clock news

  murder headlines. In his imagination,

  the odds are just as convincing

  that I would be posted on a corner

  pushing powder instead of poems—

  no reflection of him as a father nor me

  as a son. We were merely born

  in a city where the rues beyond our doors

  were the streets that shanghaied souls.

  To you, my America appears

  distant, if even real at all, while you are

  barely visible to me. Yet we continue

  stealing glances at each other

  from across the tattered hallways

  of this overgrown house we call

  a nation—a new wall erected

  every minute, a bedroom added

  beneath its leaking canopy of dreams.

  We hear the dripping. We feel drafts

  wrap cold fingers about our necks,

  but neither you nor I trust each other

  to hold the ladder or to ascend.

  TWO YEARS FROM RETIREMENT,

  MY NEIGHBOR CONTEMPLATES CANADA

  We meet at our leaning wall of cinder

  blocks that separate his yard from mine.

  We’ve promised to right it plumb

  every year. Up till now, all talk—no rebar,

  no mortar. $50 an hour. Good money.

  Damn good money, he seconds.

  Arthritis now a hymn sung

  by the choir of his cartilage, I measure

  his gait’s music as he climbs

  four short notes back into his house

  to retrieve the papers.

  He brings back a dittoed leaflet

  and a map of the northern territory

  speckled with throbbing circles,

  bull’s-eyes. Those are the job sites—so many,

  one must wonder what is Canada

  building, or how it is that they lack

  enough carpenters of their own.

  My neighbor has faith that journey–

  work in Canada will mean an escape

  from the undocumented Spanish boys

  and their nonunion, below-code labor,

  which he blames for his paychecks

  being unsteady, brittle these days.

  I don’t bother explaining globalism

  to him—as if I understand it,

  as if it threatens my livelihood

  the same way it threatens his.

  Good money—the lingua franca

  in this age of quick growth, panoramic

  decay. Our world becoming old world.

  The new world just a flimsy Babel

  tower. My neighbor must go build it

  so he may one day drop his power drill

  or bequeath it to me instead of his son,

  who builds websites, his son, who will live

  beyond us—a citizen of this shrinking

  earth where no one will need to know

  the leagues of salty blood, salty water

  marking a Mexican from a Spaniard.

  Our sleeping globe, it dreams this

  one dream of expansion everlasting.

  “WE / DIE SOON”

  This jazz. Once you learn it as your own,

  you will listen to the brassy chatter of backyard

  mechanics as they riff on recent murders—

  The boy who was killing folks

  One who had a claw hammer No, in Virginia

  The boy slashing women’s behinds

  No, sir, this boy was stabbing people, cold

  —seated on concave milk crates

  or their sweat- and engine

  oil-anointed limbs drooping

  off a pickup truck’s gate, all slack

  save for their fingers clutching cold beer.

  Through appreciation, you will learn

  to distinguish the hollers of youngins

  that end in sweet jabs and dap

  from the hollers that will summon

  red and blue lights up the hill.

  Electricity

  drowns the nights. The restless

  birds sing back to the evening

  gunshots—the magnum’s baritone pow.

  With age, you’ll come to fear June’s music—

  its melodies of bleeding boys, uneven

  tempo of jacking, of strong-arm theft

  omitted from newspapers. They want

  to get white folk moving

  over here. No transcribed tunes.

  These notes puncture, lodge in vertebrae,

  make jukeboxes of our spines.

  This living—to be erect with song,

  and then be bent by it.

  JAGGED SERENADE

  SONG OF THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN

  Sing steady, woman, as you draw

  the life jacket flush against your torso.

  Sing before you thread survival

  commands through the toddlers’ ears:

  Hold on to me. Do not let go.

  At dry dock, the men carved this barge

  from a solid slab of hubris. Now it sinks,

  woman, and its sinking begs your presence

  no more than its crafting called for.

  Leave the men to what they call destiny.

  For them, what will be nobler than dying

  in the belly of their handmade whale?

  Leave them thinking, “This devouring,

  we invited upon ourselves”—they’ll come

  no closer to believing their hands are fate’s.

  There is no space for your resentment

  in the life raft nor in your gut—that hold

  just above your birthing grotto. Fill yourself

  with the song—sing. Do not sink. You must

  be buoyant. When rescue is slow to arrive,

  you will need to drop anchor, give

  the ocean your limbs. Swell, become

  some small continent—terra firma where

  the children’s soles can rest. Damp. Shivering.

  Let them hide in your scalp’s forest. Lie. Sing

  that their fathers were towed home—corpses pulled

  over seas’ sharp lips, swallowed by distant orange.

  SUPREMATIST SWEET NOTHINGS

  ~after Malevich

  My mouth is a hammer without

  a handle or a handle

  with an absent strike-head—a black bar

  that could be a violin. My mouth’s

  ballad: Every piece of you

  feels like a nail

  against my lips. Sweet impact

  —reverberation—draws me

  again to the Rorschach of your form:

  its archipelago today,

  its crucifix yesterday,

  its graffitied moth tomorrow.

  Mirror, mirror—so many shapes

  we become when we see not skin

  but our own bald desires grafted

  over each other’s soft faces.

  Speak your want. Speak my body

  into a wind chime—a body

  all clanging and imperceptible bones.

  Then speak simply

  for the sake of breath’s nudging.

  Make of me not song but singing.

  O, BRIDE

  ~after Roy DeCarava’s “Graduation 1949”

  There is such a thing as local apocalypse.

  You know this is true because I left you

  there on the corner of do you take

  and till death—standing in that dust lot.

  How stark your dress in that caucus

  of shadows.
How stark the promise

  upon which you forever gaze: a white-walled

  Chevrolet on worn billboard, inside

  a family—”white”—pasted in our dark land.

  You should have known

  that advertisement would never be us,

  not in this nation of brown

  ghettos urged to eat

  themselves. Riots—not indigestion

  but famishment sated with fire,

  cracking glass, and blood.

  The Black, the White—this country’s beloved

  abstractions. Sunlight, too, has made

  two of you—one fabric, one shadow.

  Fabric still waits for me. Shadow accepts

  that I’ve been swallowed by the maw

  of city blight. Shadow knows

  the detritus and brick, knows it is now

  wedded to an abandoned hand-drawn cart,

  to a burden that must be gathered, like light,

  and towed toward a dawn beyond the lens.

  BEASTHEART

  I feel just like a stranger in the land where I was born.

  ~RICHIE HAVENS

  You grope beneath the bed for the dated,

  dusty phone book you last used

  to kill a wolf spider. Your fingers flip

  toward the Ds. You want “Dojo,”

  but phone books lack such sophistication.

  You regroup your digits, span

  “Embroidery” “Fire” “Glaziers”

  “Hypnotherapists” “Insurance” “Jewelers”

  until you find a number under “Karate,”

  which you dial. When a voice greets you,

  you tell the voice, “I’d like to learn

  how to hurt people.” There is some edict

  under which the voice cannot promise

  to grant such requests, but it’s a recession.

  The voice says, “We’re having a sale on pain,

  actually—two for the price of one.”

  So many people you could invite to learn

  the art of pain—to spar against—

  and all that hurting would be condoned

  inside the dojo. You can’t resist a bargain

  as morning sunlight against your skin summons

  rage’s larvae to poke through your pores,

  and you begin morphing into that walking

  abomination, the beastheart that despises

  your “white” friends for the ease with which

  they couple, the ease with which they offer,

  “Try dating outside of your race” (ignorant

  of all aside from color’s tattered flags

  and where those faux boundaries lie).

  The beastheart feeds off your frustration,

  your cyclical failure at finding love

  with another who is brown like you, negro like

  you, human like you. Has America made

  you inhuman for wanting to love someone

  like you, birth someone like you?

  Downtown, the array of lovers urges you

  to rebuke the beastheart, its lust

  for pain. You could join the blissful

  binary of pale hand / brown hand

  interlocked. “Breed the next Obama”

  or unremarkable mulatto. “Mixed people

  are the most beautiful, don’t you think?”

  The beastheart doesn’t think. It hungers

  to find a dojo and kick the crap out of all comers

  because inside you are “black” in America,

  because you tempt the beastheart every time

  you try and fail at loving another person

  wrapped in “blackness.” Knocked flat,

  again. America towering over you

  like Ali over Liston, like Love over Teddy P.

  —crooning, “I think you’d better let it go.”

  CAPTURE MYOPATHY

  Men are myths of composure. (They’ll banish

  a brother who won’t disguise his fear.) How sage

  the moustache, how proven the jaw

  on a real man, no? Then let a woman arouse

  amorous pinpricks within him. He’ll muse,

  “O, chère, you drive me to madness”—a ruse,

  for madness is no destination, no land

  separated from masculine by crimson bluffs,

  nor is madness a pillaging horde

  sent forth from women’s various lips,

  sent forth to scale those cliffs

  and raze the houses of men—upending them

  onto their chimneys. Beneath their veneers,

  men are stampedes—not of once-bitten beasts

  but of ones who run because the world is

  running around them. A man cannot flee

  a threat he does not understand

  without revealing he does not understand.

  It calls for a cloak of poise. If men could

  slow down, listen to their thumping

  little animal hearts, they might realize

  there are worse fates in life than

  being gobbled by a gorgeous predator.

  THERE IS NO POWER IN SEX

  I can’t say it is the reason he called me,

  but I’ll remember it as the conversation

  in which my friend divulged

  that a mutual acquaintance gives

  amazing head. He may have even said

  brains or dome—his lingo rising farther

  and farther away from the act.

  My friends enlist me in these wars

  of knowledge, priming my imagination

  to conjure women I know only casually

  with mouthfuls of phallus. Personally,

  I don’t enjoy head. That I cannot say

  around other men. I’d feel more

  comfortable walking toward the Pentagon

  shouting insha’Allah. It’s treasonous

  for a man to admit he doesn’t relish

  fellatio. In my nightmares, other men

  smash in my bedroom door, drag me

  from sleep, accuse you started this

  the day the world’s women deny them

  their fantasy’s privilege. But I seek

  no revolution—too messy. The truth is

  there’s no easier way to find a woman

  who will offer you head than to confess

  that you do not like it. Well,

  you haven’t had me do it. The matter

  is not one of personal technique. Women

  don’t believe me when I say that as a boy

  there was no retort that cut deeper

  than to bark back at a boy suck my dick—

  maybe a bitch added for punctuation.

  I can’t separate that history from the act,

  can’t think of head as casual, as a gesture

  other than subjugation. Some women

  claim they feel powerful taming the lower

  serpent. I think, in the mind’s recesses,

  their men mouth suck my dick, bitch—

  getting off on the penitent posture,

  the bobbing bow. I cannot judge.

  I simply want no part of the battle

  between affection and dominance,

  but even that is not true. I love

  to enlist my tongue in name

  of wracking—to pin down the pelvis

  and fiddle over the clitoris as though

  with each graze of my tongue

  it becomes a new bead on an endless

  rosary of release. This isn’t fair.

  You won’t let me do that for you.

  I’m accused of stubbornness, fear

  of my own vulnerability. I say it’s my body—

  I have the right to refuse any touch

  just as much as you have the right

  to tell me stop. Do you want me to stop?—

  to retreat, I ask disingenuously.

  I ask without rem
oving my lips.

  NOSTALGIA

  You promised to tell us, one student says

  just before I dispatch them into the blind

  freedom of semester’s end. I pause.

  Fine, but guess first. They pause.

  A salvo of numbers then peppers my face,

  too many. I listen for consensus—

  twenty-eight! I pause, ponder.

  I was twenty-eight three years ago.

  If my face is still the face of who I was then,

  I worry my students can read the map of me—

  see the pushpin puncturing Yola’s

  paper soil. Nigeria was stealing

  a woman from me. No. She chose

  leaving, then longed afterward. My body

  was a censer in which burned bits of Africa.

  How I held my smoke, how it stained

  my mouth, my nose. Everything

  tasted of sacrilege—hating the continent

  as I could not bring myself to hate her

  while my limbs roamed the plains

  of my bed—plain with her absence.

  All the want is still there, rising

  through my skin, lying to my students

  about who it is that stands before them—

  throat still smoked, sinuses clogged

  in this season of pollen’s release.

  But there are times when I feel

  my nose is just some weak felon

  tied against my face, that if touched just so—

  no bruising punch or slap but a gentle pinch—

  ash would billow forth like confession.

  NOTE BLUE

  or POEM FOR EIGHTIES BABIES

  (~also for T. P., 1950–2010)

  If it’s Teddy singing it—don’t leave me

  this way—it isn’t the arrangement

  your parents spun themselves through,

  becoming another strobe-lit dervish. Listen

  as it pounds. Think of them instead

  not dancing but stilled in a corner,

  buttressed by their own sweat

  and clairvoyant uncertainty. Every plea,

  every atonement that reaches sweet

  and hard from Teddy’s vocal folds,

  is ambivalent toward their present,

  its travails—the night humid, reduced to tissue

  paper’s fragility. It’s June 1976, years before

  code like mother and father—before either

  is prepared to admit they could not imagine

  the uphill slope of love after disco’s

  tongue licked the vinyl unfurrowed and the babies

  —babies that began as mere pheromone

  exchanges on a dance floor—