Sanctificum

by Chris Abani

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  Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

  This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

  For

  Daphne

  Anything beautiful about me was a gift from you.

  I will see you in dreams and words.

  Also, of course,

  Sarah

  Sanctificum (Latin): sanctify, make holy

  Every true poet is a monster

  TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN

  Terror is a state of complete understanding

  LARRY LEVIS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to the Reader

  Om

  Sacrament

  Divination

  A Letter to Robert Pinsky:

  Revenant

  Elephants

  Dear Derek Walcott, Patron Saint of Shipwrecked Poets:

  Descent

  Dear Kimiko Hahn:

  Processional

  God’s Country

  Pilgrimage

  Benediction

  Histories

  Dear Yusef Komunyakaa:

  Dew

  Nomad

  Renewal

  About the Author

  Books by Chris Abani

  Links

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  Om

  1

  The hills of my childhood are purple with dusk and wings —

  guinea fowl launched like a prayer to the still forming moon.

  I hold Bean’s shell to my ear. There is no sea.

  But only sea. By my bed, in an empty chair, my shirt unwinds.

  I remember my aunt counting the dead in the newspaper.

  I never told anyone that every sliver of orange I ate

  was preceded by words from high mass.

  Per omnia saecula saeculorum.

  Spit out pit. Amen.

  Juice. Amen. Flesh.

  2

  A full moon leaning on a skyscraper. The taste:

  qat and sweets on a tropical afternoon.

  The dog’s black tongue was more terrifying than its teeth.

  The gravestone rising out of the puddle was more sinister

  than the body we discovered as children swinging

  in the summer-hot orchard.

  3

  The old woman singing a dirge has a voice of dust.

  Sorrow lodged like a splintered bullet next to the heart.

  A man once asked me in the street:

  Do you own your own bones?

  She likes the home I come in, I say to Cristina

  as we drive toward the Golden Gate.

  Bean, I repeat.

  She loves the home I come in

  and I am alive with fire and scars.

  Here is my body, I say, eat it, do this,

  remember me —

  4

  Even now melancholy is a skin flayed

  and worn in dance through the city.

  Yes, the city becomes skin too and wears me

  as skin and I want to say, This is my body, as I stroke

  the curve of the fountain in the park.

  This is my blood. Drink it. Remember.

  The safety of doorways is an illusion.

  They lead nowhere.

  This is why we build houses.

  Sand, when there is no water, can ablute,

  washing grain by grain even the hardest stone of sin.

  But you, but you, you are a sin that I live for.

  Ne Me Quitte Pas. Ne Me Quitte Pas. Ne Me Quitte Pas.

  Nina’s voice walks in dragging bodies,

  dead black men that bled unseen in the dark

  of southern nights, shaded by leaves

  and the veiled eyes of hate.

  And in a poem, Lucille stands in the shadow of a tree

  and pours libations for our souls,

  for our salt, for our gospel.

  5

  Somewhere a man speaks

  in the dark, voice lost to rain.

  I know this hunger, this need

  to make patterns, to build meaning

  from detritus; also the light

  and the wood floor bare but for the lone slipper

  tossed carelessly to one side. I admit the lies I’ve told.

  Look, nothing has been true

  since that picture of hell on the living-room wall lost its terror.

  I say I want a strong woman, but unlike Neto

  I cannot have the woman and the fish.

  The war followed.

  Children are losing their souls to the heat.

  That is to say, poor American soldiers.

  The rich have found a way to charge theirs to Amex.

  Ask this: what is the relationship of desire to memory?

  Here is a boy in the airport café, hair cropped from service.

  And he closes his eyes to take a sip of coffee.

  And smiles as the dark washes the desert away.

  6

  Los Angeles:

  A red sky and angels thick like palm trees,

  and garbage blown in the wind like cars

  and the gluttony of SUVs

  in an endless river of traffic.

  Through the dark, we say, through the dark:

  but do we ever really know?

  There is a man in a field and he is searching for God.

  Father, he says, Father.

  In the distance, birds, traffic, and children.

  There is a blue sky. There is a sky blue with night.

  The call of the earth is a primitive song,

  stomping feet and broken men.

  There is a blue sky. And night.

  The city is a flock of lights.

  The darkness of tunnels like caves is knowledge,

  also mortal. Maps are like God.

  They are the city yet not the city.

  They contain the city but yet do not.

  We trace the lines in loss.

  Sometimes we find treasure.

  Sometimes something fills the mind,

  something at which we pause, stopped.

  The way a photograph cannot remember the living.

  7

  To die is to return.

  To fly is to be a bird’s heart.

  Neither is freedom.

  If it were we would have no name for it.

  No language. Not even the temptation of wind

  blowing a dark woman’s hair away from a cliff’s edge.

  Instead, feathers are brought to my door every day by mystery.

  Kindling for a fire, a beacon, an epiphany I cannot light.

  This is the body of Christ.

  Sanctificum.

  Sacrament />
  1

  Have you heard of the oracle of the Igbo?

  The one called Chukwu? Just one word: God.

  The oracle of God.

  The voice of God.

  The final arbitration.

  Kpom kwem.

  Deep in a grove of trees, the sacred lake,

  and rising in the gloom and heat,

  mist, the very breath of divinity.

  The unbearable trepidation,

  the worship, the sheer terror and earnestness

  trembling the supplicants. And the priests

  sitting on rocks and in trees on haunches,

  silent like vultures or Rilke’s unspeakable angels.

  And then a pilgrim wades cautiously into the lake.

  On the shore, the line of unannointed

  shivers in a shared awe.

  And if the petitioner is beautiful or strong,

  the priests hold her under, then shackled,

  for slavers. In the lake, red dye bubbles up

  as God smacks his lips.

  And that endless line of believers near faint

  with the fearsome beauty of the thought:

  Please consume me, God.

  Consume me and find me worthy.

  But don’t let me die.

  2

  There is risk in this —

  Not in the words, but the dreaded embodiment of light,

  a sacred song. A river darker

  than caverns immeasurable,

  a sacred river; not all Ganga, not all Alph,

  but still fire, still fire.

  Before this flight, before this persistence

  the soul is bare.

  Holy the water.

  Holy the smoke.

  Holy the flame.

  Holy, holy, holy.

  3

  Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets

  in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn

  for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk.

  If there is a way it is here.

  Salt and ash.

  This is how the Igbo clean their teeth.

  Grandmother grinding charcoal

  coughing as the silt rises.

  Then salt rubbed into the black

  as though morning were trying to temper night.

  Then water and a fingertip collecting the gray,

  the unidentifiable finger dipping into

  a mouth held open like a wound —

  A thick sludge complicates my joy.

  It is made of the dissolved bones and flesh

  of men we buried in swamps

  behind the walls of internment. Buried

  in shallow graves like a hand cupped in peat,

  then bodies and lime: the hiss and sizzle, and the suck

  of earth filling with water.

  Of swamp digesting histories and love.

  Instead of a preface, instead of a requiem,

  the symphony of rain fills the night

  with the distracted hurry of wild horses

  crossing a plateau under a threatening sky.

  I am not afraid of love, or its consequence of light,

  Joy intones, chant like skin, like sand, like water.

  4

  There is fog this morning. On my continent

  children die. African children die every day.

  It’s what they do.

  I can still hear my mother’s sewing machine

  stitching the afternoon with promise. Under a tree,

  in the scent of rotting fruit, I washed

  bitter-leaf for dinner. Washed and squeezed.

  The bitter foaming away.

  Like frothy green blood from the neck of sacrifice.

  A dog is barking at spirits in the heat.

  Language escapes me still — see it sprinting

  down the street. Crazed. A crazy man.

  Babbling. Babel. This is my language.

  On a wall in Sarajevo, graffiti reads:

  KILLING IS MY BUSINESS

  BUSINESS IS GOOD. THE FROGMAN.

  Sem gave me the book with the graffiti.

  In D.C. he said, My name is Sem,

  eyes narrowed, even as his lips smiled.

  I know this trim. A name for invisibility.

  A loss for a chance to be here.

  Do I not carry a pocketful of accents?

  In halting speech I said it wrong: Semezdin Mehmedinović.

  He smiled as though I were singing an aria.

  We went back to coffee, the dark, and rain:

  a Washington, D.C., street and the glow of lights.

  Agi Mishol said, Choose your rebbe carefully.

  Someone who sees who you can become.

  I doubt there is anything like truth here in this tea shop

  but the chai is good and the light on Bean is golden.

  Divination

  1

  How can a people who have paid such a price

  for life, return from the grave with such vengeance?

  And who will count the Palestinian dead?

  And who mourns for them? Stones and steel

  and mortar bombs will break my bones.

  In Bean’s voice, Aygi returns as a girl

  slender with olive in her eyes and a smile —

  and snow, again snow, the cadence soft, falling.

  Text message to Bean sent from my phone:

  Ronald Reagan Airport.

  Departure Gate —

  I hope you get this.

  Through night and rain and a plane.

  Things wear the musk of elegy.

  And maybe even a ghost. A double

  rising like light from a wet road.

  By an African roadside, a woman

  more skeleton than flesh squats.

  Death wears down her resistance.

  The sun tries to be merciful.

  2

  I don’t know why I sing

  in languages I cannot understand.

  Fast-moving trains draw time ahead and

  then there is the sea and the blue kite of horizon;

  a perfect chalice for night

  and the communion sliver of moon.

  I am driving to Santa Barbara.

  The sun this afternoon is a fallen angel, but beautiful.

  Zora said, “Black people are art.”

  Hallowed be thy name.

  Which is to say, there is no end to ocean,

  no article to limit. As for dream, he is a man

  with dark robes and a gaunt face and sigh so weary

  it makes the nightmare tedious. Every night he is waiting.

  He doesn’t think it funny when I laugh at the crow on his shoulder.

  You said Mother would no longer make you sad. I believed you.

  Yet over and over I wash the two dresses a woman left

  after she was done with me. The smell is summer.

  3

  Even in the agony of waiting —

  this is the way she loves the dream.

  And what woke me was the scent. Like the smell

  of coffee my mother beat from the folds of her day dress.

  There is a small girl shivering in a stream

  as her brothers keep watch from the lip of a wooden bridge,

  while behind them, mere inches from their buttocks,

  cars pass. Each counted in an arc of spit, each

  boy puckering fast to win the count.

  Their legs’ kicking casually over the abyss belies their fear.

  If you know sorrow, you know it hurts in the body.

  I project my hope into the streets of South Africa.

  4

  No I am not afraid of the eye chart:

  in THE dmv

  But i sHakE

  at The Uniformed

  COP who WaLks In.

  My fear of uniforms is an old habit, comfortable.

  Sometimes even the chief fryer at McDonald’s can

  make me
break into a hot sweat if I am not expecting his glance.

  Monsters don’t crowd your psyche

  but rather sit awkwardly on the remote control,

  too polite to get up and move it, until

  the constantly changing channel is unbearable.

  The odds are that my political views won’t stop the invasion,

  but to drink Ethiopian coffee during a bomb-

  storm is still rebellious.

  A LETTER TO ROBERT PINSKY:

  This is wood, enchanted wood.

  Still the fire scorches and we say wood

  still the pain burns from the club

  and then we say wood

  still the planks dovetail and we caress

  the smooth and the rough

  sensuous, delectable, and yet sorrowful

  and then we say wood.

  Revenant

  1

  Jefferson Elementary wants a name change

  because Jefferson owned slaves. Sequoia

  Elementary, they say. Chief

  Sequoyah and the Cherokee nation owned 1,500 black slaves.

  What kind of avatar cannot save a moth

  from the crush of a wheelchair?

  Absence births an ache.

  Late at night when I can’t sleep I draw plans

  for the radio Christopher Leibow placed

  on his father’s grave.

  I am unable to love my father, so this.

  It is so exhausting to hate the dead.

  Of course it is dangerous.

  Every angel dies like this,

  wings spread like rugs for God’s feet.

  2

  Holocaust Memorial in Berlin:

  Tall slabs of concrete forget what has been made.

  Darkness irrigates narrow alleys between the forest

  of stones. This might be a new Stonehenge.

  I feel I will never escape from here.

  This is knowledge, also guilt.