Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth
Page 2
of soil before boarding half-broken boats
& rubber rafts—half of the young women
big with life inside them, flesh & blood
for daydreams of the Arabian nights,
as makeshift charts & constellations
work their way through war & rumors
of war. The smugglers count their loot.
Hard winds rattle gongs over sea salt
till the rusty engines die, & their cries
moonstruck sirens, pirated schooners
adrift under a mute sky, rock to & fro,
& the fight goes out of the few alive.
Their relatives & friends, old lost folk
songs, mountains & valleys, all left
behind. Searchlights spot the dead
hugging the living. Draglines raise them.
Pray for those who’re braver than us.
The lucky ones stumble out of stupor,
tried by raging water in morning light,
enchanted by lingo of the albatross.
THE SOUL’S SOUNDTRACK
When they call him Old School
he clears his throat, squares
his shoulders, & looks straight
into their unlit eyes, saying,
“I was born by the damn river
& I’ve been running ever since.”
An echo of Sam Cooke hangs
in bruised air, & for a minute
the silence of Fate reigns over
day & night, a tilt of the Earth
body & soul caught in a sway
going back to reed & goatskin,
back to trade winds locked
inside an “Amazing Grace”
which will never again sound
the same after Charleston,
South Carolina, & yes, words
follow the river through pine
& oak, muscadine & redbud,
& the extinct Lord God bird
found in an inventory of green
shadows longing for the scent
of woe & beatitude, taking root
in the mossy air of some bayou.
Now Old School can’t stop
going from a sad yes to gold,
into a season’s bloomy creed,
& soon he only hears Martha
& the Vandellas, their dancing
in the streets, through a before
& after. Mississippi John Hurt,
Ma Rainey, Sleepy John Estes,
Son House, Skip James, Joe
Turner, & Sweet Emma,
& he goes till what he feels
wears out his work boots
along the sidewalks, his life
a fist of coins in a coat pocket
to give to the recent homeless
up & down these city blocks.
He knows “We Shall Overcome”
& anthems of the flower children
which came after Sister Rosetta,
Big Mama Thornton, & Bo Diddley.
Now, the years add up to a sharp
pain in his left side on Broadway,
but the Five Blind Boys of Alabama
call down an evening mist to soothe.
He believes to harmonize is
to reach, to ascend, to query
ego & hold a note till there’s
only a quiver of blue feathers
at dawn, & a voice goes out
to return as a litany of mock
orange & sweat, as we are sewn
into what we came crying out of,
& when Old School declares,
“You can’t doo-wop a cappella
& let your tongue touch an evil
while fingering a slothful doubt
beside the Church of Coltrane,”
he has traversed the lion’s den
as Eric Dolphy plays a fluted
solo of birds in the peppertrees.
THE BODY REMEMBERS
I stood on one foot for three minutes & didn’t tilt
the scales. Do you remember how quickly
we scrambled up an oak leaning out over the creek,
how easy to trust the water to break
our glorious leaps? The body remembers
every wish one lives for or doesn’t, or even horror.
Our dance was a rally in sunny leaves, then quick
as anything, Johnny Dickson was up opening
his wide arms in the tallest oak, waving
to the sky, & in the flick of an eye
he was a buffalo fish gigged, pleading
for help, voiceless. Bigger & stronger,
he knew every turn in the creek past his back door,
but now he was cooing like a brown dove
in a trap of twigs. A water-honed spear
of kindling jutted up, as if it were the point
of our folly & humbug on a Sunday afternoon, right?
Five of us carried him home through the thicket,
our feet cutting a new path, running in sleep
years later. We were young as condom-balloons
flowering crab apple trees in double bloom
& had a world of baleful hope & breath.
Does Johnny run fingers over the thick welt
on his belly, days we were still invincible?
Sometimes I spend half a day feeling for bones,
humming a half-forgotten ballad
on a park bench a long ways from home.
The body remembers the berry bushes
heavy with sweetness shivering in a lonely woods,
but I doubt it knows words live longer
than clay & spit of flesh, as rock-bottom love.
Is it easier to remember pleasure
or does hurt ease truest hunger?
Our summer, rocking back & forth, uprooting
what’s to come, the shadow of the tree
weighed as much as a man.
FROM
TALKING DIRTY TO THE GODS
HOMO ERECTUS
After pissing around his gut-level
Kingdom, he builds a fire & hugs
A totem against his chest.
Cheetahs pace the horizon
To silence a grassy cosmos
Where carrion birds sing
Darkness back from the hills.
Something in the air, quintessence or rancor,
Makes a langur bash the skull
Of another male’s progeny.
The mother tries to fight him off,
But this choreographer for Jacob
& the Angel knows defeat
Arrives in an old slam dance
& applied leverage—the Evening Star
In both eyes, something less than grace.
UTETHEISA ORNATRIX, THE FIRST GODDESS
Mottled with eyes, she’s a snag
Of silk from a blood orange
Kimono. This moth, a proto-
Goddess, flits about as if grafted
To an uneasy moment. A little machine
Inside, she coaxes every male to deposit
Sperm, & weighs each with an unholy
Exactitude. She can correct
A mistake with metabolic
Absolution. Only the biggest is
Fertilized, & all the others grow
Into nutrients for her. Food
Defines them. Otherwise,
They depend on promiscuous
Wings to beat till their world
Turns into light & sap.
NIGHT RITUAL
The spotted hyena
Dances, her mock penis
Aimed at the moon. A mile away
A king cobra flares its hood
& strikes a lion. He kneels
Under a pendulous firmament as the venom
Takes hold. She’s graceful, nimbused,
Leading her quarrelsome legion. Eyes
Flicker like stars along the timberline,
Yellow lights through grass,
& Botswana turns u
nder their single-minded
Creed. They try to outrun luscious
Blood, till they’re a tussle
Of moonlight. She’s the first to sink
Teeth into the lion’s belly, & yanks
With all the strength gods entrusted to her.
LIME
The victorious army marches into the city,
& not far behind tarries a throng of women
Who slept with the enemy on the edge
Of battlements. The stunned morning
Opens into a dust cloud of hooves
& drums. Some new priests cradle
Stone tablets, & others are poised
With raised mallets in a forest of defeated
Statuary. Of course, behind them
Linger the turncoats & pious
Merchants of lime. What’s Greek
Is forged into Roman; what’s Roman
Is hammered into a ceremony of birds
Headed east. Whatever is marble
Burns in the lime kilns because
Someone dreams of a domed bathhouse.
ODE TO THE MAGGOT
Brother of the blowfly
& godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork
& flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus Christ, you’re merciless
With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar’s tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.
No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.
SLIME MOLDS
They’re here. Among blades
Of grass, like divided cells.
Between plant & animal. Good
For nothing. In a rainstorm, spores
Glom together. Yellow-white
Pieces of a puzzle. Unable to be
Seen till united. Something
Left over from a world before—
Beyond modern reason. Primeval
Fingers reduced & multiplied
A hundredfold, the most basic
Love & need shaped them into a belief
System. The color of scrambled eggs.
Good for something we never thought
About, these pets of aliens crawl up
The Judas trees in bloom.
SLOTH
If you’re one of seven
Downfalls, up in your kingdom
Of mulberry leaves, there are men
Betting you aren’t worth a bullet,
That your skin won’t tan into a good
Wallet. As if drugged in the womb
& limboed in a honeyed languor,
By the time you open your eyes
A thousand species have lived
& died. Born on a Sunday
Morning, with old-world algae
In your long hair, a goodness
Disguised your two-toed claws
Bright as flensing knives. In this
Upside-down haven, you’re reincarnated
As a fallen angel trying to go home.
NIPPLES
As if my mind’s double-jointed
Sometimes, I have wanted
To bow my head & kiss
My sad, stingy nipples.
I have desired music to live
Beneath the skin, with the same
Hairless ease & untamed yearning
As the Kritios Boy who outwitted
Time’s polish. I am bowed
To questions in my head before
I was born. Hungry to kiss jubilation
Into my body, I can almost remember
When I was a girl. After the breaking
& breaking in, now these nubbins
& nips are purely aesthetic, two
Abbreviated peepholes.
SCAPEGOAT
The alpha wolf chooses his mate
For life, & the other she-wolves
Stare at the ground. Yellowish
Light drains from notorious eyes
Of the males, stealing their first
& last sex. The pack’s outcast,
The albino we humans love,
Whimpers, wags his tail,
& crawls forward on his belly.
He never sleeps at night.
After pacing down thorny grass
Where the alpha male urinated,
A shadow limps off among the trees.
Already sentenced into wilderness,
As if born wounded, he must stand
Between man & what shines.
VENUS OF WILLENDORF
She’s big as a man’s fist,
Big as a black-pepper shaker
Filled with gris-gris dust,
Like two fat gladiolus bulbs
Grown into a burst of twilight.
Lumpy & fertile, earthy
& egg-shaped, she’s pregnant
With all the bloomy hosannas
Of love hunger. Beautiful
In a way that forces us to look
At the ground, this squat
Venus in her braided helmet
Is carved from a hunk of limestone
Shaped into a blues singer.
In her big smallness
She makes us kneel.
SLAVES AMONG BLADES OF GRASS
The Amazon ants dispatch
Scouts armed with mandibles
Sharp as sabers. They return
To drum each other’s heads
With antennae, & then send out
Columns of warriors to surround a nest
& abduct pupae. As if made for battle,
With jaws so deadly they can’t feed
Themselves, they possess slaves.
New blades of grass beaded with water
Light a subkingdom beneath
Shadowed footsteps where the sky
Meets indiscernible green of river
& jungle, in this terrain
Where a world is dismantled
To make something else look whole.
A PORTRAIT OF (SELF) DECEPTION
When the grand master of folly
Turns to see if other mortals
Are looking at him & Hermaphrodite,
A hairline crack runs beneath
The Pompeian fresco, & we feel
Like children at a Saturday matinee
On the verge of shouting Don’t
Across the river Acheron.
We see Hermaphrodite’s muscle
Beneath the rounded whiteness,
& already know the outcome of this
Tussle of light & panic against
Disrobed stone. We’re there
With them, where one is another,
On the precipice of Hesiod’s field
As the wind sings false things true.
SEX TOYS
Lined up like toy soldiers
In the attitude of pillage,
They’re filled with nothing but ohs
& ahs. One endless night, a tool
Of torture, & next day, a godsend
Illustration of the pleasure principle
Molded or carved into pliable mystery
& elation. Prometheus said the king of Albe
Wanted his daughter to couple with a phallus
Which appeared in his chimney, but she sent
A servant who became the mother of Romulus
& Remus. Made of aluminum or hard rubber,
As if we need something to help
Break hearts & leave slow nicks
In stony soil, these instruments
Raise temples beneath reason & skin.
MEDITATIONS ON A THUMBSCREW
This can make hard men
Confess to how much wate
r
They’re made of: the saliva
It takes to polish river stones
Into a levee song. Which godhead
Did someone steal this blueprint
From in a dream? The blind prisoner
Who refused to draw a circle in dust
Around his executioner, he knew
What the Latin verb pollere meant
To the Greeks who said anticheir
(Another hand). But that was before
Ovid used the gods as punch lines,
When they were still in the trees
& hadn’t yet climbed down
To curse the human thumb.
BEDAZZLED
A jeweled wasp stuns
A cockroach & plants an egg
Inside. In no time, easy
As fear eats into someone,
The translucent larva grows
Beneath its host’s burnished
Shell. The premature stinger
Waits like a bad idea, almost
Hidden. Summertime
Breathes on a thorny leaf.
Before the new wasp breaks
Free, they are one. No longer
Fat on death’s fugacity,
By tomorrow afternoon
It will cling to a window screen
Bright as Satan’s lost tiepin.
THE CONGO SNAKE
Feet of petty chances, you
Came out on the other side
Of love & mercy. No one
Cares if you rise from the lower world
Or not, as something to grind up
For cat food, & even the hunger
Of gods can’t wish you away.
In your cave of primordial mud,
Window through slow water,
We pray only ghosts & goblins
Look at you. The untouchables
Tattoo your image on the soles
Of their feet. The monkey
God swears you don’t exist,
& in the house of good tidings
The devil is blessed before you.
THE LURE
The batfish hides there
At the bottom of desire.
A fleshy, wormlike lure
Dangles freely, luminescent
As a French tickler or line
From a love song personified.
Without eyes or guts, the male
Grows into the female, a Jonah
Inside a scaled-down Moby Dick.
She’s bewitched among sea hair