Chorus

by Saul Williams

  37

  What do you want me to say,

  that I like the idea of being an animist, trees my

  preferred object of worship? Not once has any tree

  ever told me a thing let alone scooped me up and saved me

  from the impending flood or an army of orcs surging

  from the bowels of earth, sorry, Gaia, ok, Yemaja,

  -yeah, yeah, The Ocean, let me finish-

  I have listened carefully . . . once I climbed a six-story-high Maple to listen.

  Just when I felt I was making some headway a drunk childhood friend

  (we were friends since we were children and then adolescents experimenting

  with everything from heights, to alcohol to God, just like you want to

  instead of normal flirting) climbed one branch above me to see what I was up to.

  The last branch actually, which snapped under her light, perfect athletic young body.

  She fell six stories, landing on her back conscious enough to know instantly

  she was paralyzed and would never ski again. No, that by no means broke her

  faith, nor mine, but I highly doubt swapping notes on spiritual practices

  is her preferred method of flirting. She is still devoted to sports.

  I have not had visions when holding crouching dog for too long or is it arching crane?

  I have done neither, but one time I went to Havana with a person much like yourself.

  We got a reading from a santero, he gave us beads and a deity each, the beads were so heavy

  we had to take the D Train to Brighton Beach and throw them into the sea.

  I’m short of breath in saunas so I have never done a sweat lodge but three of my four

  deadliest car crashes happened in Vermont where there are many non-Native American

  sweat lodges

  and after emerging miraculously unscathed from the gnarled remains of 3 out of 4 accidents

  (once it was snowing) the sky was profoundly clear and blue, yeah like a door,

  maybe a window, not sure.

  Sure I’ve had a poem just ‘come to me as if I were a mere vessel,’ but not for

  a long time and even those needed editing. Nothing sticks a thorn in my crown

  more than a poet fishing to get laid with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo all prostrate

  in a room full of guppies. You are correct, the gods’ ability to arouse is profound and

  not inappropriate but it can be awkward, like in ’85 when I wanted to convert to Catholicism

  in Apizaco Mexico because I was obsessed with the glow-in-the-dark crucifixes

  sold outside the church, I wanted to buy as many as I could to sell to

  Madonna fans in Boston but felt it would only be appropriate to convert first.

  As I toyed with the idea, the idea grew until I could feel generations of Aztecs

  pass through me when an old woman brushed my shoulder after prayer. Finally

  one evening, after feeling embarrassed about buying yet one more glow-cross

  from the same guy five days in a row, I stuffed it in my pants, it began to glow, I felt it,

  my abdomen abuzz, my first look at a Victoria’s Secret catalog, ten, alone in the bath.

  For all I know God is in lunch, during Ramadan we chose God over lunch for a month.

  At sixteen I walked into La Grande Mosquée and announced I wanted to convert to

  Islam.

  They asked me to say Allah ila haa Mohammedan rasulullah, so I did.

  They said, There ya go, you’re a moslem. Yes, it felt anti-climactic even in French.

  Then again, celebrating Eid a year later with two thousand other moslems

  in the foothills of the Himalayas in un-self-conscious synchronicity was proof

  that Allah passes through all of us, with each transfer of spirit, unknown energies

  are more palpable. Many times that year I had out-of-body experiences

  to the point where I could see myself in context and realized I looked

  as post-colonial as the Aussie hippy in Haridwar, saffron robes, beads

  and bald head tonguing down his girl in front of Maya Devi Temple.

  I will tell you this, one week after my brother died I saw something in the sky

  (no, I won’t tell you what it was) that affirmed my belief that everything,

  every faith, myth, superstition, miracle, rumor, conspiracy, cult, self-help program,

  everything, all of it is true.

  38

  Truth: I have never apologized for my own skin before,

  for the way Newark bends me like sunrise gleaming through bus windows

  or the way I let myself go like doves at the matrimony of fate and free will.

  Tell me this is the way things fall apart.

  Truth: My ex-significant lover walked out of Buddy Wakefield’s feature last night on the

  premise that God lives in North Carolina between the eye of a needle and the thread

  weaving Aesop’s fables together. He claims to have a keen ability to detect heresy and,

  apparently, lynch mobs don’t need rope or melanin before.

  Lie: I am to blame.

  Lie: A legacy of shame on the underbelly of a nation can be remedied

  with

  handshakes and convenient silence.

  Truth: There are times when I am insecure in my humanity,

  in the way my

  body contorts and bleeds to keep this universe in balance.

  Truth: Prejudice is the only way we’ve learned to box our own shadows,

  saints whose

  halos are one photon short of revealing themselves.

  Truth: God could exist in the air,

  blowing string-theory daffodils into the

  nothingness without a care.

  Would our trespasses be any less holy?

  Dare-

  tell me what your God looks like

  sitting on a crumbling mountain of misdeeds

  and

  family trees bending in the wind.

  Tell me how he learned to hate his own shadow,

  how he taught his spitting images to split and

  splinter

  until we became the crosses that broke his spine.

  Tell me how hate became dogma,

  how love became an international distress signal.

  Truth? God is a cutter.

  She parades slash marks around Paradise

  and plays with asps in her spare time;

  call her Cleopatra with a mortal complex.

  On her last bad day,

  she lucid dreamt the Matrix and called it “Earth”

  because “Gaea” sounded too easy to fall in love with.

  She is in love with energy.

  (She only gave humans sex organs because she confused us with the trees.)

  Truth: God is a woman with Body Dysmorphic Disorder,

  but she can come back if we let her-

  stop superimposing our rough drafts of God

  onto an unsuspecting deity

  because she is running out of room on her arms

  to carve an identity from.

  Still workshopping the theory of everything

  being birthed in her belly,

  she hasn’t gotten to existence yet.

  Save sexuality for second grade,

  for she is just learning to spell her name

  in kindergarten calligraphy,

  and I guarantee it looks nothing like

  Jesus or Buddha or Allah,

  like Krishna or Moses.

  It looks like big-bang theories

  collapsing under the weight of change,

  like a little boy finger-painting forever with a smile on his face

  and it sounds, suspiciously, like home.

  39

  You are the sweat on the brow of a mother

  in her thirteenth hour of labor.

  You are the fickle
fingers of a child grazing

  a splintery fence midday.

  You are a sixteen-syllable sentence uttered

  by a woman with beautiful lips.

  You are the thousands of end-of-the-world

  kisses in constant exchange at each

  terminal.

  You speak and rain falls upward.

  You blink and butterflies dissolve.

  There are shells of people out there trying,

  each day, to become an atom in the vast

  dance of your movements,

  to seek the mode in the range of your

  emotions.

  You are bottled nebulae with a cork

  that is waiting to pop

  You are lunar flora: prickly pear cacti which

  fill craters steeping in a celestial marinade

  hailing from the Horsehead.

  And should you stand beneath the sun for too

  long, the land which surrounds you

  would recede into the dark recesses

  from whence it came,

  and the soft luminescence of your eyes

  would suffice to lead your way.

  40

  We learn in grade school,

  that there is a finite amount

  of matter on Earth. All that will ever

  be on this planet, already is.

  And there will never be any less.

  It’s a hard concept to accept at first.

  Because every last bit

  of my grandmother’s body

  seems to be gone. But in fact,

  science says, even if you cremate

  the arms and legs and ribcage

  of the person you loved,

  every molecule is still here,

  it’s just that all the space

  between the bones and the blood

  is now eliminated, and so,

  someone that used to take up

  a whole bed, now, fits into a shoebox.

  And my best friend’s daughter,

  seemed to just start growing

  inside her, as if she came from

  nowhere and nothing,

  but in fact, she is actually,

  all the hamburgers

  that her mother ate

  for nine months

  transformed into fingers and toes

  and green eyeballs and golden curls.

  And the only exception at all,

  the only way for more matter

  to arrive on earth is if meteors

  or some other astronomical objects

  unexpectedly glide our way

  to land on one of our islands

  or in one of our seas

  and that’s what I think

  I want to liken Love to,

  at least for the metaphorical

  purpose of this poem.

  Because when it arrives, it does so

  with an other-worldly crash

  into the continents that are

  our chests. And it is so strange,

  so new, that I cannot believe

  it was here all along, disguising itself

  as some other thing.

  I know, science says, Love is not matter,

  but most days, it feels heavier than rocks.

  And what I want to know

  is where it goes when you

  feel certain that you cannot

  find it anymore.

  There are ex-wives all over

  the world, who at one point,

  promised everything they ever knew

  to their husbands,

  allowed children

  that were made of half of him

  to swim inside her,

  and drink from her,

  and she thought he was a miracle,

  better than any other answered prayer,

  and then he destroyed her somehow.

  Somewhere along the way

  he forgot how extraordinary she was,

  stopped seeing the certainly amazing

  parts of her, and now

  she hates him with a fever

  that could cook a stew.

  But where did all that Love go?

  Where does it sit now, though perhaps

  quiet, changed, but still with the same

  number of atoms and molecules,

  once as big as a mountain, now as small

  as a seed—but it has to be here

  somewhere, right?

  I myself, have Loved in a Large way.

  Love that was the size of an army

  of dinosaurs, and now, I feel nothing

  for that over-and-done Love.

  I almost, cannot even remember

  that Love, I have to read old poems

  and inscriptions to find proof that it

  ever was. But it has to be here

  somewhere, right?

  Maybe I will find it

  under the rug, or swept

  into a corner that I never visit,

  or inside an old compact.

  I suppose I may not even recognize it

  when I do. Perhaps it is just

  a spoonful of glitter now, and when

  I come across it I will think it is

  some eye-shadow that I forgot I bought.

  I will maybe just shake my head

  and wonder why I ever thought

  that it would look good on me.

  I Love in a Large way, right now.

  And if I wake up in the middle

  of the night, and look quietly

  at the Love that sleeps beside me,

  I cannot ever imagine

  it leaving this planet for anything.

  I am certain, despite what science says,

  that Love is matter, that it will

  never go away, and never get less.

  I am also certain,

  that it was not here all along,

  and instead, it came dressed in flame

  from outer space.

  41

  I fasten my mouth around yours like a plummet

  from the bow of a sinking ship. Suck the red wine

  from your breath until it hurts, until good memory

  rises above us like God-ash and nothing is real

  but your tongue, your coiled breath banging

  the rusty screen door of my throat like a moan

  that breaks free and dances across the dark.

  The sticky shiner mooned around my eye socket

  like a rain cloud waters at the touch, you pull my t-shirt

  delicate as knifepoint up and over my head. It stings

  where his pinky knuckle carved out a chunk

  in my lip like a wood splitter. I am a hazard tank of bruise

  and shame; you are a prayer that remembers how to listen.

  The coin-edge crest in the crook of my nose

  where that lonely bastard’s ring trucked into my skull

  beneath that streetlight is still open and pink,

  unstitched cartilage cursing at the air like an armless demon –

  you place your lips on every part of me that has retreated

  to a corner I never thought I’d find, soft and new,

  whisper the names of each wildfire hue

  beginning to eggplant swell and settle into a tornado

  around my eye. I love you, harder than ever

  and am overflowing with words I do not have.

  Again. We are naked as morning in the black of this

  brilliant summer heat. Wrapped in the tree-trunk

  capes of each other’s wordless mouths like animals,

  clawing from the water at our feet.

  42

  As if, I too, were in the bayou I kill a fly in my hands & stare

  into the elm blood from my cut

  lip on a bottle something moves and we call it Evenin’

  rolling over in her slip of shade and nightsound as if, I too

  were in the bayou sweat lit underlantern the body
’s tender

  meridians you close your teeth on something bucks

  in the switchgrass who else but Evenin’

  shaking loose her blanket of prey as if

  I too, were in the bayou how first I rip tissue from the bone

  then break its sweet white horn

  43

  I.

  Outside my window, through the orange drapes,

  I can see a light on in the building facing mine.

  It is late now, an hour past when well-behaved

  citizens will have gone to sleep, and I wonder

  who it is that finds themselves restless in this

  perfect heat. Perhaps it is two people, lying

  next to each other on the mattress, sheets

  thrown to the ground, knotted on the floor. It

  is too hot for lovemaking, surely. Too hot even

  for touching. No, I am sure they have both just

  been lying there awake, sweating into their

  pillows, breathing in the muggy darkness, both

  hands placed by their sides, fingers spread

  open. They have both been lying still, one

  of them desperately trying to fall asleep, the

  other measuring the distance between their

  fingertips, waiting until the humidity becomes

  too wet, the fire on the skin too near; waiting

  until this moment to turn on the bedside lamp.

  Deciding finally, to honor this kind of arousal

  with something other than breath.

  II.

  Most days, waking is the hardest.

  But it is also when Poetry arrives—

  stands patiently outside the shower,

  places its hands on the mirror,

  wipes away the steam.

  And then there are days when

  sleeping is the hardest. The fight

  of muscle against world becomes

  so constant, that surrendering

  to slumber doesn’t promise

  nearly enough relief. These are

  the times when hands feel nothing

  but empty. And these

  are the times when the ceiling fan

  is left off. When this heat

  becomes the only lover

  to hold, the only weight

  that feels familiar anymore.

  III.

  Tonight, I raised my hand to my face

  to brush away an untamed curl of hair,

  and when it slid past my nose, it smelled

  suddenly of you. Not your cologne, or

  the soap you use, not shampoo or aftershave.

  That skinsmell I find tucked into your

  neckplace—that late afternoon nap’s shadow

  that rises and falls, rises and falls against