Lighthead

by Terrance Hayes

  touches the South. “Three: we wanted more boulevards

  named for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. An airport

  named for Sojourner Truth.” The roots of the avocado tree

  can raise pavement, so it’s not too crazy to imagine the fruit

  as a symbol of revolt on the abolitionist flag. We are all one kind

  of abolitionist or another, no doubt. And we are like the avocado too

  with its inedible ruby-colored seed that can actually sprout from inside

  when the fruit is overmature, causing internal molds and breakdown.

  “Demand number twenty-one: a Harriet Tubman statue on the mall!”

  Brother man is weeping now and walking wet tissue to the trash can

  and saying, “Harriet Tubman was a walking shadow,” or, “Harriet Tubman

  walked in shadows,” or, “To many, Harriet Tubman was a shadow

  to walk in,” and the meaning is pureed flesh with lime juice,

  minced garlic, and chili powder; it is salt, and the pepper

  Harriet Tubman tossed over her shoulder to trouble the bloodhounds.

  Many isolated avocado trees fail to fruit from lack of pollination.

  “Goddamn, ain’t you hungry?” I whisper to Yoyo, and she puts a finger

  to my lips to distract me. Say, baby, wasn’t that you waking me up

  last night to say you’d had a dream where I was a big luscious mansize

  avocado? Someone’s belly is growling. “We weren’t going

  to be colored, we weren’t going to be Negro,” the man says,

  and I’m thinking every time I hear this story it’s the one telling the story

  that’s the hero. “Hush now,” Harriet Tubman probably said

  near dawn, pointing a finger black enough to be her pistol barrel

  toward the future or pointing a pistol barrel black enough

  to be her finger at the mouth of some starved, stammering slave

  and then lifting her head to listen for something no one but her could hear.

  A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME

  It was the night I embraced Ron’s wife a bit too long

  because he’d refused to kiss me good-bye

  that I realized the essential nature of sound.

  When she slapped me across one ear

  and he punched me in the other, I recalled,

  almost instantly, the purr of liquor sliding

  along the neck of the bottle a few hours earlier

  as the three of us took turns imitating the croon

  of the recently deceased Luther Vandross.

  I decided then, even as my ears fattened,

  to seek employment at the African-American

  Acoustic and Audiological Accident Insurance Institute,

  where probably there is a whole file devoted

  to Luther Vandross. And probably it contains

  the phone call he made once to ask a niece

  the whereabouts of his very first piano.

  I already know there is a difference

  between hearing and listening,

  but to get the job, I bet I will have to learn

  how to transcribe church fires or how to categorize

  the dozen or so variations of gasping, one of which

  likely includes Ron and me in the eighth grade—

  the time a neighbor flashed her breasts at us.

  That night at Ron’s house I believed he, his wife,

  and Luther loved me more than anything

  I could grasp. “I can’t believe you won’t kiss me;

  you’re the gayest man I know!” I told him,

  just before shackling my arms around his wife.

  “My job is all about context,” I will tell friends

  when they ask. “I love it, though most days

  all I do is root through noise like a termite

  with a number on his back.” What will I steal?

  Rain falling on a picket sign, breathy epithets—

  you think I’m bullshitting. When you have no music,

  everything becomes a form of music. I bet

  somewhere in Mississippi there is a skull

  that only a sharecropper’s daughter can make sing.

  I’ll steal that sound. More than anything,

  I want to work at the African-American

  Acoustic and Audiological Accident Insurance Institute

  so that I can record the rumors and raucous rhythms

  of my people, our jangled history, the slander

  in our sugar, the ardor in our anger, a subcategory

  of which probably includes the sound particular to one

  returning to his feet after a friend has knocked him down.

  CARP POEM

  After I have parked below the spray paint caked in the granite

  grooves of the Frederick Douglass Middle School sign,

  where men-size children loiter like shadows draped in outsize

  denim, jerseys, braids, and boots that mean I am no longer young;

  after I have made my way to the New Orleans Parish Jail down the block,

  where the black prison guard wearing the same weariness

  my prison guard father wears buzzes me in, I follow his pistol and shield

  along each corridor trying not to look at the black men

  boxed and bunked around me until I reach the tiny classroom

  where two dozen black boys are dressed in jumpsuits orange as the carp

  I saw in a pond once in Japan, so many fat, snaggletoothed fish

  ganged in and lurching for food that a lightweight tourist could have crossed

  the water on their backs so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread

  to drop into the mouths below his footsteps, which I’m thinking

  is how Jesus must have walked on the lake that day, the crackers and crumbs

  falling from the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was the one fish

  so hungry it leaped up his sleeve that he later miraculously changed

  into 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 waiting to talk poetry with a young black poet,

  packed so close they’d have eaten each other had there been nothing

  else to eat.

  THE ELEGANT TONGUE

  It’s Yoyo who says Tonguing, a form of kissing

  favored among the half-lit young, is mostly overrated

  and rarely practiced among married folk like us,

  but we give it a try, clumsy as two elephants swapping

  gin-tinged saliva Friday night to prove the idea

  is always better than the act, and since I am wistful

  as the blind old lumberjack who touched the elephant’s knee

  and fumbling for his ax declared, This animal is most like a tree,

  I remember my tongue sandpapered against vowels in a mouth

  named Yolanda in the dark of a yellow bus long ago,

  and I tell Yoyo how that girl may still be somewhere thinking fondly

  of our tangle. Forgive me: I believe, as the elephant must,

  that everything is punctured by the tusks of Nostalgia.

  They use those things to uproot roots, but let’s never forget

  the old blind warrior who touched the elephant’s tusk

  and said, This thing is most like a spear, and took it as a sign

  that Man should spend his life defending his house,

  and though he probably wasn’t wrong, it’s the best intentions

  that turn need into want, which is another way of saying

  the tongue is mostly disgust coated in desire,

  or desire coated in disgust depending on the way you look.

  My tongue is
unusually short, but I’m happy to say

  Yoyo prefers my lips. If you are not an elephant more adept

  at using your trunk than your tongue, you cannot wrestle,

  nor caress, nor blow water into the air while your kiss

  is being chewed in a dining room beside a houseplant

  called The Mother-in-Law’s Tongue because of its sword-shaped

  leaves or perhaps because it has no mind for boundaries,

  though boundaries too are a matter of the way you look.

  The African elephant, for example, can be found in countries

  like Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya,

  Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa,

  and Zimbabwe, and that must mean a tongue knows

  nothing about territory. It’s a spit of land, a promontory.

  Remember the blind prisoner who touched the elephant’s flank

  and said, This creature is most like a wall, and believed it

  meant all the world must be a jail? Some say it’s mostly walls

  that constitute a marriage, and in many ways that may be true,

  since Yoyo will not divulge the slip and slither administered once

  by a boy plucked from the pews of her serious Pentecostal history,

  which I know featured a perspiring, eye-tossing glossolalist

  mouthing things only the faithful could decipher so that Fuck

  might be translated as the sound at the beginning

  of Forgiveness, and the hands of the white-bloused ladies,

  her momma among them, patting the convulser’s shoulders,

  might be said to emulate several vibrating reeds.

  I’m talking about the rapture of tongues. The Holy Rollers

  say it’s most like a flame in the devil’s blackout

  because in Acts, tongues of fire are said to alight on the apostles,

  filling them with the Holy Spirit and allowing them to speak

  in a language understood by foreigners from several countries.

  Darling, kiss me again in the nastiest possible way.

  When the blind fondle the elephant’s trunk, an organ

  of fifteen thousand miraculous multipurpose muscles, and hiss,

  This creature is most like the serpent in Eden,

  tell them, If there is goodness in your heart, it will come

  to your mouth, and if that doesn’t work, tell them,

  In the dark it’s not the forked tongue that does the piercing.

  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 miss

  the quiet. Don’t you? When I said, “Fuck the deer

  antlered and hithered in fur,” it was because

  I had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist.

  If I were in charge, I would know how to fix

  the 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 asked

  God if anyone born to slaves would die

  a slave, He said, “Sure as a rock descending

  a hillside.” That’s why I’m not a Christian.

  ANCHOR HEAD

  Because keyless and clueless,

  because trampled in gunpowder

  and hoof-printed address,

  from Australopithecus or Adam’s

  dim 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 dreamanchor

  , I leaped overboard

  in my shackles and sailed

  through my reflection on down

  to ruin, calling out to God,

  and then calling out no more.

  A FORM OF SEXUAL HEALING

  for Marvin Gaye

  Will you speak to me now bedeviling, sweet muser?

  Old coke-face up in the song bar all karaoked in discord,

  Your music lavished by a boozehound whose singing

  Is syncless, whose outcry eradicates your ghost-Written

  dabblings. The difference between

  “What’s Going On” and “Let’s Get It On” is filled

  With semen and a chorus of maidens in makeup chanting,

  WakeupWakeupWakeup. Like an echo disrobed, like a man

  On his back and a woman breaking against his pose—

  Tonight when I heard you, whose singing was hunger,

  I cried for more than a moment over the forms of healing

  Because my crush was demised, because my joy was capsized,

  And the feeling made me clean as your voice on its side.

  Will you speak to me now, soul-musing bedeviler,

  From that hole out of which all the prisons of the world arise?

  TWENTY MEASURES OF CHITCHAT

  a pecha kucha

  [THE MAGIC OF MAGIC]

  When everything is a spell, when my cries reverse

  in mid cry (and here I am talking voodoo),

  I wake as a small black dog shucked in uncertainty,

  feverish, grown sick of monotony and words like time.

  [SQUAT]

  You may think back when there were twenty tribes

  in twenty square miles of land speaking twenty

  different languages, life was all that, but you’d be wrong.

  Everyone was thinking, “What do they think of me?”

  [MORNING ALARM]

  When everything dope as a trifle of fangs

  is disrupted by bells and the blinging

  which is the other side of a dream,

  I am beside myself with the daze the day begets.

  [THEY’RE ON THEIR WAY THERE]

  When the day is spooked and hooded in cloud (a hot mess),

  the dream’s patchwork dispatched, the felt of a feeling,

  when it’s possible each of us is a protagonist, in what

  ways will our whats differ from one another?

  [EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME]

  In the portable book I read how blacks were troubled

  by none of the troubles of today. To become invisible, it said,

  one need only walk through rain. I tried this, but it did not work.

  I chased the dream, but when I woke, the spell endured.

  [LUNCHING]

  I was scratching our name into the bark of a tree.

  I was throwing up and down on my hands and knees like a soul

  who is not a ghost yet. I wouldn’t have made it without those

  tiny tablets. I swallowed four, and then, baby, I was good to go.

  [RULES FOR SUCCESS]

  “Have you ever done a thing so much you learn to do it

  without thinking?” you ask. And then: “What do you know

  about inaction in action?” But what I hear is:

  “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking till you do.”

  [QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY]

  I heard you ask, “Why was the dream invented,

  if not to undo?�
� My mouth opened like the hole

  in the wall you were punching. I barked at the shadows,

  a foot fell above us, the ghosts came back.

  [LANDSCAPE WITH RIOT]

  When the house windows were broken, I was one of the people

  stepping in, then out again, with boxes and whole registers

  of what belonged to me, with dream-swollen jewelry leashed

  about my neck, with blood on my shirt and blood on my teeth.

  [THE IMMINENT TILL]

  Time is the real cannibal, mesmerizing even at face value,

  weighing down the stars, and the river holding the unlucky

  body attached to a cluster of fish, where the heart is

  so diluted the doctors wear gloves when they handle it.

  [ANTIGRAVITY MACHINE]

  When I float like a lost balloon looking to become invisible

  (default sleep, default air, default black), it is the hour

  there’s enough darkness to click the headlights on,

  and enough light you cannot see the light they make yet.

  [GHOST HARDWARE]

  “Given a soul for, at the start, nothing, it will be all uphill

  heaving vapor,” you say. “Daylight caked in the whip

  and eyelashes, the voice of somebodiness wired deep

  in the bones, a breath that makes everything green.”

  [SEEDS IN A RAINSTICK]

  When I pant, “What now?” with my big ear to the door