by Chris Abani
But the stigmata should never compare
the depths of his wounds with Christ.
Here is not the time for that.
What is here is a young boy picking a scab
and dabbing at the new berry of blood
with nothing more than what the moment offers.
Teenagers scream through the rows to dispel shadows.
Malinda beside me says:
You know my grandfather was in a camp in Serbia.
In the Second World War.
A work camp.
A death camp.
His ghost is here.
My breath is hot and white in the cold.
I am distracted by it.
3
A Chicago Tribune obituary:
In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans.
In the Red Square, Lenin is sprouting fungi.
King Oedipus to the barman: She wasn’t all that.
4
Someone once told me his father stole trees.
In Michele’s kitchen, Yang is singing
a haunting Mongolian water song
so out of key it stops my breath.
His voice, pitted, circles the salad.
5
It does not matter how many fatwas
the Ayatollahs place on Salman,
Muhammad will always be an illiterate.
Blessings be upon his name.
But more pressing perhaps is that Gibreel,
with all that burning knowledge,
all that fire from the East, could never quite spell.
6
A buffalo drowns in a flood.
A child on a roof holds on with fatigued feet.
It might have been Burma. I can’t remember.
I changed the channel.
For years I hated the Arabs with a venom.
Now I know that I cannot
blame it all on the novels of Leon Uris.
What words erase, texture resists.
Elephants
1
There was this small college in the South where I read
and three white boys in the audience
in KKK outfits, stiff like lilies for a funeral.
The walk up to them was long with fear and shame and rage.
But I took the hood off one and wore it back to the stage
and through my reading to a deafening applause.
But I mostly remember how hot it was under the fabric
and how that boy’s smell filled me,
and how wet my tears were.
And Bean in the warm bed breathing softly and me cold
on the floor and writing this poem in an old notebook.
And the arrow slit of skylight lets in only a red night.
And her Gennady Aygi translations flutter by the bed
like a flock of simple white birds.
The more we promise to never leave our lovers,
the faster the horizon arrives. My lust is simpler still:
that Bean return to me every night with her gentle warmth.
2
Doesn’t it always begin with a hanging?
With a moth dying against a screen door?
But what of the dreams of glory? my friends ask.
Ah, that too. But it seems there is no death
without the dying, no light without the beguiling.
Iman says a dark passageway is suitable for dance.
Shadows are the best we can do.
Even now my name startles me, reminding me of nothing.
It is hard to read the gorgeous prose of Love in the Time of Cholera
and still want to write. Sometimes it is all I can do.
And in that hotel room in Rotterdam, burning through
cigarette after cigarette and tea after tea,
a woman argues that art is the only way to be beautiful
and we agree that we are both born from the same stubborn star.
We stop arguing only once, when her husband calls
and she says to the darkness beyond the window: I miss you.
The phone cradled in the crook of her neck
as she stirs my tea. I want to cry
in the stillness of the smoke.
3
This is faith.
We are always looking into the past: even a mirror.
The you turning in a shaft of light, shirttails unfurled
like bird wings caught in the shudder of surprise.
The you so free, so full of joy. Even that you
is in the past as you see you. Even as you dance
through the motes radiating through you,
you have lost it. Yet we keep dancing.
The mended chair is already mended before we break it.
4
There is a place on the veld where elephants go to die.
Here they come across the skeletons of other elephants.
They pause amid the whiteness, raise their trunks and howl
to the absent flesh, circling the bones, picking up each one,
putting it down; circling one last time, they stand still in silence
for an age, then move. Steps less assured, slower.
Why was it so hard to tell my mother, I love you,
like the man in Sarah’s translation of Gennady’s poem
tracing a woman’s face with a flower?
To cling to death, to a metaphor as real as a dying parent,
is to wrap language around an absence.
There are stories that can kill you.
5
It is not likely that my father and I will take a walk soon
and not just because he is dead.
But he did come back in a dream to cook
me a simple dish of beans with tomatoes
and, through the steam rising from my bowl,
he smiled as he cut me a slice of bread,
vanishing slowly with every saw.
The heart is like this sometimes.
It finds the hands of your dead father
and shaves away another layer
like a thick slab of warm bread.
Sometimes that, Tadeusz. Or sometimes this.
That the lines lead you out of the labyrinth.
That the Minotaur is your toy bear thrown casually
against a chair in the dark.
That rain will come.
That rain will come.
6
Mist rubbed from the car window smears the landscape,
and even the word, puja, like the hush of fallen
leaves grazing temple floors, is revolution.
For is prayer not disobedience?
The questioning of God’s order?
This meter is red, the falling notes turn blue,
but what tramples them into the earth is
the turmeric of feet praying to Shiva.
This too:
smoke collecting under hair and clothes
then shaken to the dust with all the salty pleasure of sweat
and the other graces the body drops from its ocean
like pearls on a dream’s string.
Is there water in the flower of a snowflake?
This precise geometry?
7
Freedom smoked a pipe on the steps of the museum
in Harare. She said, sniffing,
Winter has come early to Zimbabwe.
There was nothing gentle about this former guerrilla:
but all grace, all grace.
I didn’t believe her when she said:
Once I saw butterflies like a man’s soul
in a clearing, in the war. Here,
in Venice I see a gypsy singing
in St. Mark’s Square. And pigeons.
Also rain and an inexplicable ray:
blue light from a stained-glass window.
This is perhaps what Freedom meant.
Wisdom met me at the airport.
It’s never too fa
r to travel home, he said.
Metaphors are everywhere.
Signs, Happiness says as the elevator stalls.
Of course they are both right.
Of course they are both wrong.
DEAR DEREK WALCOTT, PATRON SAINT OF SHIPWRECKED POETS:
I am not Crusoe, though I may want to be.
I am a man. That much at least is not
desire. I am building a fire, a funeral pyre
for the attavus. For the ritual. I am
burning to ash in my desperate signaling.
In the distance. A fire burning and a man.
Descent
1
All those demonstrations, Mother,
of the Billings Ovulation Method;
aged seven, translating to women:
when your vulva swells,
before your period comes, insert —
and they, never meeting my eyes yet asking —
and for the virgins, the piece of a balloon stretched
over the lip of a Coca-Cola bottle was the hymen.
My mother’s pen pushing against it
demonstrating pressure, pushing agonizingly,
slowly, until the virgin and I both
let our breath out in a long shuddered relief —
Like a train breaking for a tunnel.
Like the sun after a thunderstorm.
Who can say how much is remembered and how much invented?
Who can say what is right and wrong?
Countless good my mother did for those women
who didn’t even know they could own
their own wombs or vaginas.
Even now, because I am a man,
this freedom is still academic.
Hail Mary full of grace —
Women in my childhood blackened their teeth with snuff.
It was said that men were drawn to that as much
as to the eloquence of their ample backsides.
Women so strong men never got
to choose anything for them.
When did these women begin to think a gentle spray
of flowers worthy of their love?
The women of my village felt their love better sated
with smoked antelope legs and baskets of bananas or yams —
children it turns out cannot eat flowers.
Yet their bodies were adorned with so much beauty.
I know they knew more than they would ever reveal to me.
2
I have seen many red nights and purple
evenings taut with cold and winterlight,
and afternoons yellow with ripe leaves,
but I have never seen the northern lights
or a comet shower or an alien or a desert crossing
from Mexico, people loping like coyotes
in the floodlight-silver night.
Although there was an evening when rounding a bend
on a river walk in London I saw a heron lift off
and slice the silence with its snakelike head,
all wings and feathers and lapping water.
A crepuscular light, brittle like a saltine, and oh, the salt.
3
Also it makes me pause to think that anyone could have
read Rilke and then engaged in the Holocaust.
When Ilya reads, the poem is wounded.
An animal crying in the face of an approaching angel
whose voice blends with its own —
Is this why Israel forgets the holocaust its people suffered
and then brings one against the Palestinians?
For Iman it is a difficult question — if we ask Israel
(and she says the name like a song, like a prayer: Is-ra-ayle)
to stop bombing the Arab, we must also condemn
the suicide bomber. For her, there is no hope for peace
as long as men measure armistice in pints of blood shed
on both sides, seeking an impossible balance.
DEAR KIMIKO HAHN:
It is not that I mean to intrude on you,
but you are the only one I can trust
not to lie to me. I must bite
deep into this feast of flesh,
no matter how disgusting,
looking for the blood beneath the blood,
skin beneath the skin.
Do you think I am a cannibal?
Worried
Chris.
Processional
1
Quench the light —
and my cousin’s voice heavy
with an Igbo inflection that made it a threat,
like, “I will quench you.”
Like, the man quench yesterday.
Like a fragile neck breaking.
The way our ethnicity was nearly quenched in a war
that began with a pogrom against us.
Quenched and all but gone but we raged.
Still —
Igbos littered northern streets like so many dead flowers.
I trimmed the wick. The lantern gulped hungrily for life,
stuttered once, twice, then gone.
Quenched.
And night, free at last, stirred, stretching, feral.
But I am still here so my blanket protected me,
the heat rash a reasonable price for safety.
The thing is, every day I was painted in calamine lotion
until I looked like a ghost, scaring myself as I went to bed.
And the world turns —
Once again rain, but not all water.
From the car window, winding up a snowy mountain pass
in Colorado: the frozen river looks like corroded copper,
all green and mottled white and the breath of time.
What a remarkable thing a voice is —
In Haiti the poor gather to protest in the slum Cité Soleil,
but no one is smiling at the irony.
I saw this old man once at the doctor’s office;
he looked confused as though it was a mystery
why he had clung to life so savagely, so earnestly.
2
A foot poised over a pool.
The surface breaks, a boy falls in,
his laughter fills the afternoon.
Ritual is the only language we truly believe in:
tea steaming a glass mug on a table,
smoke from a cigarette filling the room with blue,
the way the sun falls across our face as we sleep.
These are our things, we say.
But somewhere a door closes and another day begins.
What if the woman we have always loved,
the one we desire to wake to, is our mother?
The holy homeless fill the city like so many weeds.
Only God’s children can see them.
A blue cross on a wall is a flame.
A ball falling from the sky is a meteor.
Rust is its own kind of truth:
like blood, like cities, like sunlight on a dusty road.
We never find it, of course, but it’s always there,
between the smoke and the flame.
3
This is a circle song. Like songs of old.
We go over the same territory, like a mower
religiously eating grass that will grow again.
Some call it history.
The wise say it is a pond, or river.
There are things you can only say
with a canyon. Or smoke
moving across a valley toward the mist
at the foothills. I want to return
to that boy I was, but what will I say?
What would I have him do differently?
Believe in the faith of moths?
Believe in the inevitability of shadows?
This poem is like someone waiting for a bus
so long he has lost the urge to travel.
My brothers must be as tired of this as I,
dragging
love as a tally board behind us,
marking off an endless but complex math
of ego and one-upmanship and debt.
But the men who came before us didn’t
teach us another way.
And even when one of us summons
the courage to break the heavy wood of it
and stoke a fire of liberation,
the others chalk up more and more.
In the end, does it really matter
who started the war?
Palestine? Israel?
Iran? Iraq?
Russia? Chechnya?
The U.S. and the rest of the world?
Break the board of death.
We are tired of tallying the wounds.
4
Beati quorum via integra est.
Cape Town, South Africa:
Rocks sunning like whales calling to cliffs
as indifferent as teeth in an octogenarian’s mouth.
Dressforms in an abandoned shop haunt the night.
Note to self — Look up:
Vivant.
Revenant.
Lacunae.
5
Why would a boy who knows nothing about alchemy
and the machinations of blood and other terrors respond
to a voice calling for a rain of death and other terrors?
Red Riding Hood walks out of the forest and her basket explodes.
Count the dead spilling out of the café like rank meat thrown
to dogs in the street. Revenge begets nothing but itself.
Sometimes after a suicide bombing, flesh and bone
from the dead bomber embed themselves under
the skin of the survivors: organic shrapnel.
6
I want to speak about loss.
About my father and the word we never found.
In a dream Satan told me he was a crow
and that the small intestine was so long
God hid it in the stomach.
Perhaps this is why the death of a father
brings new life. Communion;
