Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
[THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA]
ALL THE WAY LIVE
THE GOLDEN SHOVEL
SHAKUR
THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA
NEW FOLK
A PLATE OF BONES
THE SHEPHERD
HIDE
FOR BROTHERS OF THE DRAGON
THREE MEASURES OF TIME
[GOD IS AN AMERICAN]
THE AVOCADO
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME
CARP POEM
THE ELEGANT TONGUE
MYSTIC BOUNCE
ANCHOR HEAD
A FORM OF SEXUAL HEALING
TWENTY MEASURES OF CHITCHAT
NOTHING
GOD IS AN AMERICAN
[COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE]
LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO ADDICTION
LINER NOTES FOR AN IMAGINARY PLAYLIST
SATCHMO RETURNS TO NEW ORLEANS
FISH HEAD FOR KATRINA
SNOW FOR WALLACE STEVENS
TANKHEAD
TWENTY-SIX IMAGINARY T-SHIRTS
MUSIC TO INTERROGATE BY
THE MUSTACHE
COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE
[COCKTAILS WITH ORPHEUS]
BULLETHEAD FOR EARTHELL
SUPPORT THE TROOPS!
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS?
IMAGINARY WEDDING SONG
LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO PARENTING
GHAZAL-HEAD
I AM A BIRD NOW
COCKTAILS WITH ORPHEUS
ARBOR FOR BUTCH
MULE HOUR
AIRHEAD
Notes
About the Author
PENGUIN POETS
ALSO BY TERRANCE HAYES
Wind in a Box
Hip Logic
Muscular Music
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Terrance Hayes, 2010 All rights reserved
Page xi constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hayes, Terrance.
Lighthead / Terrance Hayes.
p. cm.—(Penguin poets)
eISBN : 978-1-101-22288-1
I. Title.
PS3558.A8378L54 2010
811’.54—dc22 2009053319
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications for first acknowledging the poems (and previous versions of the poems) in this manuscript:
American Poetry Review, Bat City Review, Barrelhouse magazine, Black Warrior Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, McSweeney’s Literary Journal, McSweeney’s Online, MiPOesias, Muckworks, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Quarterly West, Sou’wester, Smartish Pace, The New Yorker, Third Coast, and Washington Review.
“The Avocado” also appeared in State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems, edited by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder.
“Cocktails with Orpheus” and “Mystic Bounce” also appeared in Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Norman Minnick.
“The Elegant Tongue” appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, edited by Cate Marvin and Michael Dumanis.
“Fish Head for Katrina” also appeared in So Much Things to Say! 100 Calabash Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes.
“A House Is Not a Home” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner and David Lehman.
Deepest gratitude to Yona Harvey, Rob Casper, Shara McCallum, Jeffery Thomson, and Crystal Williams for laying their careful eyes on this collection; and to the Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support. Thanks, as well, to those who influenced this manuscript through friendship, encouragement, and conversation: Elizabeth Alexander, Radiclani Clytus, Toi Derricotte, Adrian Matejka, Paul Slovak, and my families.
It is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”
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 others
were it not for the rain falling through the roof.
I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless
with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra
in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.
Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight
drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life
doing no more than preparing for life and thinking,
“Is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come
to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,
something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables
of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words
and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.
The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say
about the way we live. I’d rather have what my daddy calls
“skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street
just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:
that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement
of 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 us
Molly 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 fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word<
br />
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.
[THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA]
ALL THE WAY LIVE
“Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?”
Hieronymus asked, hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered
Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets
The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of Robert
E. Lee guarding the county courthouse, a symbol of the bondage
We had spent all of our All-the-Way Lives trying to subvert.
Hieronymus’s thighs shimmered like the wings of a teenage
Cockroach beneath his skirt as a bullhorn of sheriff verbs
Like Stop! Freeze! and Fire! outlined us. The town was outraged:
The red-blooded farm boys, the red-eyed bookworms of Harvard,
The housewives and secretaries, even a few liberals hoorayed
When they put us on trial. We were still wearing our lady wardRobes,
Hieronymus and me, with our rope burns bandaged
And our wigs tilted at the angle of trouble. Everyone was at war
With what it meant to be alive. That’s why we refused to be banished,
And why when they set us on fire, there was light at our core.
THE GOLDEN SHOVEL
after Gwendolyn Brooks
I. 1981
When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we
drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left
in them but approachlessness. This is a school
I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we
are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk
of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.
Standing in the middle of the street last night we
watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike
his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight.
Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we
used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing,
his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.
The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We
watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.
He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.
He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We
stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,
how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June
the boy would be locked upstate. That night we
got down on our knees in my room. If I should die
before I wake, Da said to me, it will be too soon.
II. 1991
Into the tented city we go,
we-akened by the fire’s ethereal
afterglow. Born lost and cooler
than heartache. What we
know is what we know. The left
hand severed and school-
ed by cleverness. A plate of
weekdays cooking. The hour lurk-
ing in the afterglow. A late-
night chant. Into the city we
go. Close your eyes and strike
a blow. Light can be straight-
ened by its shadow. What we
break is what we hold. A sing-
ular blue note. An outcry
singed exiting the throat. We
push until we thin,
thinking we won’t creep back again.
While God licks his kin, we
sing until our blood is jazz,
we swing from June to June.
We sweat to keep from we-
eping. Groomed on a diet
of hunger, we end too soon.
SHAKUR
I’m coming at you live from the halfway out
Where the winter morning stretches out
Like a white sheet over lovers the infinite
Has fetched. The still and bone-blue white
Couple found parked, frozen on the highway,
I’m thinking of them and the drug that made
Them think they were warm enough to chill
Because I know staying alive requires pills
And a wicked streak. I’d need a head cocooned
In bass, I’d need to be locked in a womb
To hear your dopey two-note melody, your song
Pimped by wreckage, your light longing
For lightness. I’d have to be as quiet
As the youths whose youth made them stupid
And lovely. They are God’s niggaz now like you.
I’m thinking of the stall of intoxicated cool
That stalled you before it stalled them. I know
Men who want to die this way, smoke like snow
Tattooing their bodies with narcotic holiness,
The glaze of status, the faux lacquer of bliss.
I’m coming at you live frostbitten and thinking,
“Language is for losers.” Who cannot think
Our elegies are endless endlessly and the words
We put to them too often unheard and hurried?
I’m coming at you live from the intangible.
Do you want to ride, or die crowded into a small
Space spitting, Come with me? One day my song
Will be called “Language Is for Lovers.” One
Day desire will not be a form of wickedness.
And when you offer your drug, O Ghost, I’ll resist.
THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA
after Elizabeth Alexander
doesn’t leave the train station, according to the story
Stagger tells, until tomorrow morning. We shoot up 23
North, singing our version of Tribe, put pedal to floor
doing a buck fifty, Stagger’s braids in a red bandanna,
chrome on the rims, the cab smoky, the volume rolled
to its end. Beyond the insomniac nuclear silos built against
nature where the wind tastes like roadkill or tiny bowls
of fire, a gun in the glove box, there is no one badder
than Stagger speeding across two counties until I can see
he’s getting staggerly. I drive the rest of the way, pedal to floor,
because his train to Africa is leaving before she can please
him. We stop at a drive-through strip club where the poor and
lonely are working. Naked, jaded, sea-hag-looking sisters,
only one of them pretty, a dark chocolate chattering girl.
Stagger spends the next hour soaking his money in her
skin. Between there and Africa Simpson, all his questions
amount to, “What’s someone like you doing here with the aunts
of poverty?” To which each of her answers sounds like “Rent.”
I had no money, but the whole time I napped she was haunting
my body. I was so fucked up then, even the reflections
of truckers were godlike to me. She was one of my nieces,
caught along a road named America or named Jemima,
bucking for bills or company with the rhythm of a rhesus
monkey. We made the train, but her image was still with me.
NEW FOLK
I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.
After “We acoustic banjo disciples!” Jebediah said, “
When
and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers
come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotten intended?”
We stole my Uncle Windchime’s minivan, penned a simple
ballad about the drag of lovelessness, and drove the end
of the Chitlin’ Circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple
where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened
by our twelve-bar conviction. A month later, in pulled
a parade of well-meaning alabaster post-adolescents.
We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled
in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends
first because beneath our twangor slept what I’ll call
a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when
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