by David Lehman
News from Harlem
for Marcus Mosiah Garvey
Even here on the south side of this city
of wind and blood, news is good for negroes.
A fat-faced, true African man, one of
those black men you know never ever
had a doubt that he is a man and strong,
too; one of those magic men
who know what God must feel like
standing over an army of angels; one
of those men who’s stood at the edge
of the new century and seen a wide
world of what could be; a man who,
when he heard what Dubois said
about the color line thought right off
that this is going to be a century
where everybody will be talking
about niggers like they are new money,
and he, sure as hell, is going
to shine and shine. A man
with two big hands and a head
full of words who knows the freedom
of nothing to lose; a man who
knows the long legacy of rebels,
those maroons whispering Akan
in the hills—knife men, cutlass men,
roots men, Congo men;
those yellow-eyed quiet men
who look at death like it is
a good idea that someone came up
with; a man who learned by
touching the split chest of a white
man, his heart still thumping,
everything inside him slick
with blood and water, his ribs
pulled aside where the doctor
tried; that all white men
ain’t nothing but flesh, old rotting
flesh like everybody else—
a man who’s done the math
and knows that for fifty years,
his people have been waiting
for something bigger than themselves.
Well, news has it that this man
is causing trouble in Harlem
and the world won’t be the same
when he’s done with it. Even
here, the excitement of it is
rushing through the blues joints
and people are strutting about like
they have been marching, like
they been waving flags, like they shouting
the name of freedom beside
the round-faced black man,
with his proud high voice
showering imperatives on the folks
who gather to hear him talk
with his sweet island singing.
Black man sweating, dressed
clean with high collar and good
shoes. Yeah, this is good news
walking, cause we all need a daddy,
a man with a good firm voice,
a man who knows what we must
do to change this wearying world,
a man with a head full of dreams
of ships, seven miles of them
coming into that gaping Hudson
mouth, red, gold and green flags
flapping in the air—seven miles
of ships as far as the eye can see,
coming in, coming in, coming in.
from Hayden’s Ferry Review
JOEL DIAS-PORTER
* * *
Elegy Indigo
The text for today is early Miles, the Columbia years . . .
That tone pared down to essentials.
—Sekou Sundiata
“Did Miles mute his horn, because
a breeze can carry kites a gust might mutilate?”
Call him poet, professor. Call me shaky grasper of the chisel,
caught in a run-on rush to hammer it all.
The memory rushes in, frothing like a wave,
but recedes slowly as a blue crab across wet sand,
bright bits clasped in its claws.
Finally, finally, I come to believe in loss as a way of knowing.
How long does it take to hear what silence can say?
I stand at a stoplight, waiting for the colors to change.
At forty-five one has to deal with eyesight fading.
Not fading like blue from the knees of your favorite jeans
or lights on a stage above a silenced microphone,
but like a goateed poet in a stingy brim hat
covering the bets of a hooded man with holes for eyes
and scythes where his fingernails should be.
Finally, finally, I come to believe in loss as a way of knowing.
If the Blues is a river, doesn’t it carry in and wash away?
LEDs are replacing halogen and incandescent lamps,
so the headlights of some approaching cars are slightly blue
as his velvet tone joins the voices of my fallen fathers.
And I tremble ever so softly, like a kite in a breeze
or the reed in a Harmon mute during a note’s last linger.
Finally, finally . . . I come to believe in loss as a way of knowing.
from Brilliant Corners
NATALIE DIAZ
* * *
These Hands, if Not Gods
Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?
And wasn’t that good?
Them at your hips—
isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
the first Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You are mine.
It is hard not to have faith in this:
from the blue-brown clay of night
these two potters crushed and smoothed you
into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—
atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both Morning and Evening.
O, the beautiful making they do—
of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—
Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?
Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your knees?
And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—
Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium, August, and September—
And when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they bring fire?
These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you whisper, O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My hundred-handed one?
from The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day
MARK DOTY
* * *
Deep Lane
Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy trace
over the slopes of grass while I rest on a bench in the cemetery,
but we can’t stay long,
it’s a day I need to go into the city,
and when I stand up suddenly
my left leg’s half a foot lower than my right,
because I’ve stepped into the sunken,
newly filled grave
of one Herbert Meyer. I don’t know it then,
but that’s when the wind blows up from beneath,
I think I’m just off balance, and make a joke of it later,
<
br /> telling people my day began with falling into a grave,
and where can you go from there?
A few nights after
a storm blows down the moraine,
crisp and depth-charged with ozone and exhilaration,
chills my arms and face with that wind I’ve already met,
winds up the lanes and rattles the rose canes,
bends the beauty bush and Joe Pye weed down,
beautiful supplication,
the maple and walnut sway in the highest regions
of themselves, leaves circling in air
like the great curtain of bubbles blown by the humpback
to encircle the delicious schools—
Blows in my sleep
and blows while I’m cooking, blows while I read
and when I kiss does it ever blow then,
wind not particular to Mr. Meyer nor anyone else,
and thus the nervy thrill of its invitation: to be not at all
what you thought, unbound, to rush up
from the sinking earth on a gust of investigation:
now go be the crooked little house,
and the cracks in the shingles,
tunnel your hour as the mouse in the stale loaf,
fly back to the strong hands of the baker,
flour powdering a happy shroud
around the coursing veins in his forearms.
Spring backward into the wheat,
forward into the belly of the mouse-child
—what reason to ever end?
Well I know one:
if you don’t hold still, you can have joy after joy,
but you can’t stay anywhere to love.
That’s the price, that rib-rattling wind
waiting to sweep you up,
that’s the price the wind pays.
from Ploughshares
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY
* * *
The Blues Is a Verb
Pray without speech. Bear witness walking
and dying slowly. In the whole universe
this one and only place which you have
made your very own. An instant of provocation
without the proper greeting. And down 6th street,
car alarms ululating. A fifth is your morning
medicine. A silhouette in chalk
on the sidewalk watches the children
run. Down and up Second Avenue
a red Monte Carlo, slows in an
old shark-skinned suit, the air
like furious birds. Someone leans against the brick wall
sharing a cigarette, blue-black under the fire escape.
Mrs. Janofsky’s boy nods into his own hands.
The poor are many and so the women come
and go, bruises on their eyes like fake sapphires.
Men who never not hear the noise in their heads.
But not knowing the dead, roaming the streets
like feral cats, you hurl yourself into the oncoming traffic
of their eyes. Somewhere a search has been called off.
Whitecaps cover your mouth as you struggle
not to drown. You stick your fucking finger
in the socket. You cannot holler.
All the street assassins know you can break
a man’s neck in a second flat; they grin
at their electronic palms. They enter and exit
through broken arteries. A razor left by the mirror.
The ghost lines of cocaine and tar,
along the boulevard beneath the diseased
elms. Someone wishes a lottery ticket with a nickel.
from Spillway
RITA DOVE
* * *
The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude
Hell,
we just climbed. Reached the lip
and fell back, slipped
and started up again—
climbed to be climbing, sang
to be singing. It’s just what we do.
No one bothered to analyze our blues
until everybody involved
was strung out or dead; to solve
everything that was happening
while it was happening
would have taken some serious opium.
Seriously: All wisdom
is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief.
So don’t go thinking none of this grief
belongs to you: Even if
you don’t know how it
feels to fall, you can get my drift;
and I, who live it
daily, have heard
that perfect word
enough to know just when
to use it—as in:
Oh hell. Hell, no.
No—
this is hell.
from Poet Lore
CAMILLE DUNGY
* * *
Conspiracy (to breathe together)
Last week, a woman smiled at my daughter and I wondered
if she might have been the sort of girl my mother says spat on my aunt
when they were children in Virginia all those acts and laws ago.
Half the time I can’t tell my experiences apart from the ghosts’.
A shirt my mother gave me settles into my chest.
I should say onto my chest, but I am self-conscious—
the way the men watch me while I move toward them
makes my heart trip and slide and threaten to bruise
so that, inside my chest, I feel the pressure of her body,
her mother’s breasts, her mother’s mother’s big, loving bounty.
I wear my daughter the way women other places are taught
to wear their young. Sometimes, when people smile,
I wonder if they think I am being quaintly primitive.
The cloth I wrap her in is brightly patterned, African,
and the baby’s hair manes her alert head in such a way
she has often been compared to an animal.
There is a stroller in the garage, but I don’t want to be taken
as my own child’s nanny. (Half the time I know my fears are mine alone.)
At my shower, a Cameroonian woman helped me practice
putting a toy baby on my back. I stood in the middle of a circle
of women, stooped over and fumbling with the cloth. Curious George
was the only doll on hand, so the white women looked away
afraid I would hurt my baby while the black women looked away
and thought about not thinking about monkeys.
There is so much time in the world. How many ways can it be divided?
I walk every day with my daughter and wonder
what is happening in other people’s minds. Half the time
I am filled with terror. Half the time I am full of myself.
The baby is sleeping on my back again. When I stand still,
I can feel her breathing. But when I start to move, I lose her
in the rhythms of my tread.
from The American Poetry Review
CORNELIUS EADY
* * *
Overturned
What did you hear
That got you talking raw?
You got that low cloud look,
Got that heart-nicked stare.
Like the flora got voted
From under your feet.
Like someone told you a story,
Maybe the wrong story,
Palm trees where there should
Be pine. And now you doubt
Everything. Don’t you hate
Doubting everything? There’s
An unease the body radiates
When it can’t put a finger
On a lie. You got that pickle
Wince, my friend,
You look like
You lost the directions
To where you from.
from Terminus Magazine
VIEVEE
FRANCIS
* * *
Fallen
But I was never the light of my father’s eyes, nor any
well-lit brother’s (that deep-husked choir), so there
was no height from which to fall. I began here
in the proverbial bottom:
undertow, base from which one may rise but briefly,
like the failing horse knowing it must now race, must
tear out of its rusted gate, must further tear
the pleurisied lining of its lungs, let its tongue loll
ugly from the side
of its mouth. Have you seen such a thing?
Its brown coat salted with sweat as it lunges
forward and lunges again, forcing its measure
not up but out, knowing its ankles could fold
under such weight, its nose opened
into another being, sucking and snorting
the only thing it takes within that does not judge it,
the air. The sweet, sweet air
as it makes its way around a curve that might kill it,
that assuredly will kill it. Do you see me there?
Of course not.
I’m over here. Here,
in this hollow running for my low life. O Father,
for the rub of a hand over my back. O Brothers,
for the gold leaf wreath that might have meant
a stroke of my calf, for that, I stretch these legs to breaking,
I wrench this belly’s hull, dark
as all alluvial things are. Lucifer’s is a common story, a
child’s bogeyman. What should frighten you is this:
Imagine what he would be had he not fallen, had he never
known the elusive light at all, never been privy to the cords
of God’s neck, if he in fact doubted such things,
believing only in what anguishes and writhes, trusting
nothing more than what soils his hands.
from Prairie Schooner
ROSS GAY
* * *
To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian
