I am a woman.
I will rub your weary head,
dance close to you,
shuck you silver peas for dinner.
He was Otis, my father.
But you are Willie Earl and James and Ernest and Jimmy Lee.
All of you, frail charmers, gentle Delta, bodies curled against
the time gone, the time coming. I grieve you tottering toward
death, I celebrate you clinging to life. Open bony dark-veined
arms and receive me, a woman in the shape of your daughter,
who is taking on your last days as her very blood, learning
your whispered language too late to stop your dying,
but not too late
to tell
this story.
HOW TO BE A LECHEROUS LITTLE OLD BLACK MAN AND MAKE LOTS OF MONEY
for John Lee Hooker
First, you got to get the blues.
This is easy if you are a person of any gender,
and possess a pulse, a cheating lover,
a stalking ex-lover, a used Yugo, a pumping heart,
an empty wallet, a half-dead dog, an empty frigerator,
one last cigarette butt, a good memory, a nosy mama,
a lonely room, a quick trigger, roving eyes,
an addiction to whiskey,
nothing but the clothes on your back,
a jones for your neighbor’s wife,
a jones for your wife’s neighbor,
a positive test result,
an itching to leave,
an itching to stay,
or any itching where there shouldn’t be any.
Rub your hands slow over your body,
feel the valleys, the wrongs. Let misery
chomp your spine toward collapsing,
let it fold your whole self double.
Then you can walk like John Lee Hooker do—
click shuffle, bent over, nose to the ground,
wearing a cocked brim felt fedora that wouldn’t dare fall off.
Then you can think like John Lee do—
I’m old as victrola,
gotta buy a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth
if I want to feel a woman,
but I can still
sing better
than you
HALLELUJAH WITH YOUR NAME
I.
Perhaps I underestimate his importance.
After all, he was merely a crooked arm, a suit coat
dripping pressed shine, Old Spice and Wild Turkey
lending his soul a smell. He was just a flattened
and knowing hand at the small of my back, he was
nothing more than bended knees trying to match
his height to mine. The bartop was slick and glittering
with something, one leg of the jukebox propped up
too high on a cardboard square. Ask why
I remember that he never bothered to take off his
storm gray Stetson, that a single sweet thread
of sweat ran down the left side of his face, kissing
our clasped hands. I was 12, clacking knees, high-top
All Stars with flap tongues, a wad of grape bubble
plumping my cheek. He was a friend of my father’s,
his name wavering now between Willie and Earl.
He was grizzled and elegant, horrifying man-smell,
bowing slightly for permission to lead the woman
in me across a slice of pockmarked wooden floor.
Daddy grinned and hooted in the face of this crime.
II.
Slow dancing is the way sin looks when you hose
it down and set it upright, and all the time it is
the considering of further things, the music being
incidental, it might as well not be there. You can slow
dance to a dollop of chocolate, a wrinkled shred of silk,
the hot static of a child’s hair being brushed. Drag slow
on top of an angry lover’s silence, along the jittery
borders of a rain ring, on the cluttered sidewalk outside
wherever you are. You can dance to the arcing brows
of folks wondering why you have stopped to dance. Under
the thinnest pretense, you can demand touch. Without
considering consequence, you can sign your body over.
III.
By the time of that first slow dance, I had tasted
stormwater, head cheese, starch, sweet pickle juice.
In raw sanctified churches, I was swathed in crinoline
and dipped, hair first, into whatever wouldn’t kill me.
I knew how to fight for my life with a bottleneck.
I had discovered the liquid verb of my hips and had
gnawed the vinegary meat from the foot of a pig.
I could slip a thousand coins through the slot
of a juke, knowing my backbone would respond to
any song, any old keyed wail from a shattered someone.
I could exist on unclean things, slippery with fat,
and crush hugely pregnant roaches with the heel
of my hand. I dared slow-sputter four-syllable words.
Daddy taught me to be constantly astonishing.
IV.
The man who taught me to slow dance was simply
my father’s friend, who lifted me from a wobbling
stool when I nodded yes. He was that first gracious
sweep, flat laboring feet, slapped smile, awkward
realizing that a memory was coming to life in his arms.
The song? A woman was moaning so hard the record
skipped to save her. She was leaving, thinking
of leaving or had left, or someone had left her.
She had nothing left. My partner off-key spittled
every third word, flashing a gold incisor that made
me move closer to him. I wanted to get all of him
over with, to squeeze his scarecrow body through
and past me. I wanted us history. I knew then why
it is always the woman who dances backwards,
numbing her short spine, circling the man’s neck
with both arms. She is scrambling for a glimpse
of where she’s been, the yesterday she had before
he gets hard and confuses hallelujah with her name.
LITTLE POETRY
He says I am gumpopper,
wondrous shoulders,
evil on the days when I bleed.
I say take hold of both my hands.
He speaks cool water on me,
nudges my mood with a proverb.
I watch him undress, skin
unto another skin, and I turn
away to keep from craving that.
By the time his hands
touch my shoulders,
I am almost insane
with disappearing,
and the thunder.
CAN’T HEAR NOTHING FOR THAT DAMNED TRAIN
Chaos, all sound and stench, everywhere the delirium
of the ordinary. Mamie Tuttle holds court on a lopsided
wooden porch, clearly an afterthought to her house, yelping
so sideways her gold tooth rattles: Got room in my chair
if anybody need it, scratching scalp, pressing hair, S5,
make you look good this Sunday!—all of her rollicking,
her greasy hands on world hips. For a hot minute, her spiel
drowns out the Temptations moaning for crazy love from
beneath a good girl’s window. Lanky boys in worn-through
sharkskin snag the harmony, croon its bottom while Mamie,
diseased ankles damned tired now, declares O.K. dammit, $4!
Her answer is the cringe roll of cars on last rim, the squealed
lyric of double dutch girls pumping some God outta their legs.
Despite the sugar noise and veiled shit, you would think we’d
w
ant out. The dying engineered green of Garfield Park, a planned
paradise of rust and splinter, is crushed into its corner, wailing
toward the world and Mamie, who is about to nap and could give
a damn: There’s someplace better,
someplace lusher,
someplace past any reach you can reach.
Cover your ears.
Here comes the train.
That’s where it’s going.
DRINK, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS
“Tequila is a pallid flame that passes through walls and soars over tile roofs to allay despair.”
—Alvaro Mutis
Sergio was for no shit
that night. He was serving
up the blade juice, heavy-handed,
the sugary gold
sloshing over the tops
of much-thumbed tumblers.
Story was he rinsed
his glasses in gin to make sure
the germs were dead.
Well, no matter. That night
he was pinpoint focused
on laying his regulars flat
with fountains of Cuervo,
free for the time being
because he said it was.
The open mic,
an odd parade of eggshells
and desperadoes, had limped
to its usual anticlimax,
each poet duly convinced
that his lines had leapt
from the cocktail napkin,
sliced through the din,
and changed Chicago.
Now, no more
of those bare offerings,
florid lyrics of tomorrow and gray.
The doors were locked.
The M.C. was atilt, souvenir bras
dripped from the ceiling
and the Johns smelled like snow.
This was world enough,
a timed blathering of our sad biographies,
Playtex as décor,
and an overwrought
of fever water spewing
from the grimy hands
of an insane Mexican barkeep.
When we slowed,
choking on the bitter kick
as he poured and poured,
Serge bellowed a thick-tongued
threat: This ain’t no joke. Drink,
you motherfuckers.
He waved a sudden gun,
a clunky thing that sparked
snickers until he blasted
a hole in the ceiling and
revised our endings,
smalling our big drunken lives.
DELTATEACH
for all my mamas
delta teach me the sound
my heart makes when it
bends over backwards
to curse at its beat delta got
church stuffed in size 16,
carrying my gottahave milk,
telling me that i can make my
ownself feel goodjust
when i’m thinking it might
take a man to make me feel
natural
delta teach me fatback,
skillet bread, hogshead,
alaga, drive me crazy with
warm grease, fatten me up
so that i can find
my second mouth
when my living be broken
delta help me find the piece
that can still shout the little bit
that can still squeeze into
a shiny thing and go downtown
where you can
sing about it, girl, sing about it,
pray hard over it, lean into it,
work with it, fry that thang up,
flip it, cut it loose, set fire
to it, turn it over, turn it out,
make it beg, go down on it,
call it sugar out loud, get wide
for it, lie to it, lie for it, lie
with it, but baby, don’t let it kill you.
delta let me rub her throat
while she sing she
three-weave her fingers
while she sing she
wiggle like revelation
while she sing she
peel back my grinning
show everybody that lie
she find underneath there
she rip out the hooks
that man done left in my skin
ignores my pained wailing
bleedsme
delta sponge me down with
pan water dab cheap smellgood
on my shattered shoulders
call me sista when she have to
baby when she want to
and fool most of the time
delta drive her mouth all over me
feeds me pure butter from a
teaspoon make me come like i
never have then she sing me some
aspirin she sing me edged hooch. she
ignores all those eyes. she take me
so dancing
CREATIVELY LOVED
for Raymond Wood Jr., 1994–1995
I was a foot tall, charming, tot stupid,
bump stumbling, a rumble lump of less
than future. It took me minutes to die,
my self blurring and curled like a comma
in leaving, Newport stubs damp candles
in my hair. Rayie Wood Jr., pesky shard
in the hip of the world. Why else would
you lift me above your head, slam me
to tile, lift me up again by my legs, swing
me against the closed door wicked enough
to splinter Wood, call me sugary names,
oh so sweet bastard me? But I thank you
father for the patient teaching of screech,
for drenching my one tooth in blood.
Thank you daddyman, for the alphabet
of the floorboards, thank you mother
for the live matches against me. Thank
you SHUT father for the ripe THE FUCK
UP loving in your mouth, thank you for
YOU LITTLE the slam and the smash me
BASTARD and for the bounce and the
rattle, for the drama of cut beginning.
How else would I learn the huge love in
red hiss kisses, the shining purpose of me?
ELEGANTLY ENDING
for Ella Fitzgerald
A lyric unravels,
spins on dizzied axis,
one syllable slinks
and becomes several.
A stark shaft of light
illuminates a never-over evolution.
Each exhalation
excites and concludes
with a slight upturn
of phrase that compromises
the hip, roots fat legs,
lends such southern heave to torso.
Mysteries thrive in the belly
and in the miraculous
of her throating,
send two errant verbs
round ’bout themselves
and into the keys
of her spine again.
It is not for us to know
her trilling suddenly
murderous and cringe
beautiful, inbound.
Her legs gone.
A lack of this elegance
is the end of evolution.
Consider the soundless hole.
Over.
SEX AND MUSIC
Imagine my disgust at discovering that I am
actually that readable and uncomplicated,
that I could find nothing in me worth noting
except one heat and two ways to release it.
Music leads to sex leads to music leads to sex.
If it wasn’t for the clock of music imitating
the pulse of sexing someone, I could forego
this lapdance in my own lap. There’s no need
for that sliver of ice, those chilly silver utensils,
; the banshee howl, that two-way mirror,
the pliable circle of the mouth, Todd Rundgren’s
Healing, that spread-eagle, the lazy drip of any
liquid, the ritual reading of Sharon Olds, that
imprint of your urgent ass marring my wall.
I can blame you on all this, your drumbeat hip,
what writhes in your pants. I can’t stop sparking
what I keep having to douse. Kiss me that deep.
Turn the air into victim with your arms.
Dance me till weeping and the beauteous burn.
MAP RAPPIN’
for John Coltrane, and forever for Bruce
I always shudder when I pray.
Mama say the Lord enters you in stages,
first like a match lit under your skin,
then like an animal biting through bone
with soft teeth. Mama say lie still
and wait for glory to consume you,
wrap its way into your map
like a lover had his finger on paradise,
knew the way with all his heart, then lost it.
I always shudder when I pray,
so your name must be a prayer.
Saying your name colors my mouth,
frees loose this river, changes my skin,
turns my spine to string. I pray all the time now.
Amen.
Try not to touch me while I tell this.
Try not to brush the thick tips of your fingers
against my throat while my throat moves
telling this story. Don’t suddenly squeeze
my bare shoulder or travel your mouth
along the flat swell of my belly.
Don’t bite at the hollow in my back,
whisper touch my ankles,
or match our skin like spoons.
Don’t punctuate this rambling sentence
with your tongue or trace your name
on the backs of my legs,
please don’t walk the question
of your breath along my thighs
or draw a map on my quivering breastbone
guiding me to you,
me to you,
me to you,
don’t play me
that way
don’t play me
that way
the way the saxman plays his woman,
blowing into her mouth till she cries,
allowing her no breath of her own.
Don’t play me that way, baby, the way
the saxman plays his lady,
that strangling, soft murder—notes like bullets,
riffs like knives and the downbeat slapping
into her. and she sighs.
into her. and she cries.
into her.
and she whines like the night turning.
Let me sit here on the bar stool sipping something bitter.
Teahouse of the Almighty Page 3
