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The Tradition

Page 1

by Jericho Brown




  The Tradition

  JERICHO BROWN

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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.

  In memory of

  Bertha Lee Lenoir

  (1932–2018)

  I will bring you a whole person

  and you will bring me a whole person

  and we will have us twice as much

  of love and everything.

  Mari Evans

  Contents

  Note to the Reader

  I

  Ganymede

  As a Human Being

  Flower

  The Microscopes

  The Tradition

  Hero

  After Another Country

  The Water Lilies

  Foreday in the Morning

  The Card Tables

  Bullet Points

  Duplex

  The Trees

  Second Language

  After Avery R. Young

  A Young Man

  II

  Duplex

  Riddle

  Good White People

  Correspondence

  Trojan

  The Legend of Big and Fine

  The Peaches

  Night Shift

  Shovel

  The Long Way

  Dear Whiteness

  Of the Swan

  Entertainment Industry

  Stake

  Layover

  III

  Duplex

  Of My Fury

  After Essex Hemphill

  Stay

  A.D.

  Turn You Over

  The Virus

  The Rabbits

  Monotheism

  Token

  The Hammers

  I Know What I Love

  Crossing

  Deliverance

  Meditations at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park

  Dark

  Duplex

  Thighs and Ass

  Cakewalk

  Stand

  Duplex: Cento

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Jericho Brown

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special thanks

  THE TRADITION

  I

  Ganymede

  A man trades his son for horses.

  That’s the version I prefer. I like

  The safety of it, no one at fault,

  Everyone rewarded. God gets

  The boy. The boy becomes

  Immortal. His father rides until

  Grief sounds as good as the gallop

  Of an animal born to carry those

  Who patrol our inherited

  Kingdom. When we look at myth

  This way, nobody bothers saying

  Rape. I mean, don’t you want God

  To want you? Don’t you dream

  Of someone with wings taking you

  Up? And when the master comes

  For our children, he smells

  Like the men who own stables

  In Heaven, that far terrain

  Between Promise and Apology.

  No one has to convince us.

  The people of my country believe

  We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.

  As a Human Being

  There is the happiness you have

  And the happiness you deserve.

  They sit apart from each other

  The way you and your mother

  Sat on opposite ends of the sofa

  After an ambulance came to take

  Your father away. Some good

  Doctor will stitch him up, and

  Soon an aunt will arrive to drive

  Your mother to the hospital

  Where she will settle next to him

  Forever, as promised. She holds

  The arm of her seat as if she could

  Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing,

  And it is, since you’ve done what

  You always wanted, you fought

  Your father and won, marred him.

  He’ll have a scar he can see all

  Because of you. And your mother,

  The only woman you ever cried for,

  Must tend to it as a bride tends

  To her vows, forsaking all others

  No matter how sore the injury.

  No matter how sore the injury

  Has left you, you sit understanding

  Yourself as a human being finally

  Free now that nobody’s got to love you.

  Flower

  Yellow bird.

  Yellow house.

  Little yellow

  Song

  Light in my

  Jaundiced mouth.

  These yellow

  Teeth need

  Brushing, but

  You admire

  My yellow

  Smile. This

  Black boy

  Keeps singing.

  Tiny life.

  Yellow bile.

  The Microscopes

  Heavy and expensive, hard and black

  With bits of chrome, they looked

  Like baby cannons, the real children of war, and I

  Hated them for that, for what our teacher said

  They could do, and then I hated them

  For what they did when we gave up

  Stealing looks at one another’s bodies

  To press a left or right eye into the barrel and see

  Our actual selves taken down to a cell

  Then blown back up again, every atomic thing

  About a piece of my coiled hair on one slide

  Just as unimportant as anyone else’s

  Growing in that science

  Class where I learned what little difference

  God saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear,

  A puny one not much worth mentioning,

  Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lost

  When I reached for it

  To stab someone I secretly loved: a bigger boy

  Who’d advance

  Through those tight, locker-lined corridors shoving

  Without saying

  Excuse me, more an insult than a battle. No large loss.

  Not at all. Nothing necessary to study

  Or recall. No fighting in the hall

  On the way to an American history exam

  I almost passed. Redcoats.

  Red blood cells. Red-bricked

  Education I rode the bus to get. I can’t remember

  The exact date or

  Grade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarms

  That move others to charge or retreat. I’m a kind

  Of camouflage. I never let on when scared

&n
bsp; Of conflicts so old they seem to amount

  To nothing really—dust particles left behind—

  Like the viral geography of an occupied territory,

  A region I imagine you imagine when you see

  A white woman walking with a speck like me.

  The Tradition

  Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought

  Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning

  Names in heat, in elements classical

  Philosophers said could change us. Stargazer.

  Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will

  Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter

  On this planet than when our dead fathers

  Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath.

  Men like me and my brothers filmed what we

  Planted for proof we existed before

  Too late, sped the video to see blossoms

  Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems

  Where the world ends, everything cut down.

  John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

  Hero

  She never knew one of us from another, so my brothers and I grew up

    fighting

  Over our mother’s mind

  Like sun-colored suitors in a Greek myth. We were willing

  To do evil. We kept chocolate around our mouths. The last of her

    mother’s lot,

  She cried at funerals, cried when she whipped me. She whipped me

  Daily. I am most interested in people who declare gratitude

  For their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave,

  Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.

  That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be—

  No one on Earth knows how many abortions happened

  Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name,

  By taking it to breast. I don’t know why I am alive now

  That I still cannot impress the woman who whipped me

  Into being. I turned my mother into a grandmother. She thanks me

  By kissing my sons. Gratitude is black—

  Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death.

  Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

  After Another Country

  Some dark of us dark,

  The ones like me, walk

  Around looking for

  A building or a bridge.

  We mumble and pull

  At our lips, convinced,

  Until we see how far

  Down the distance.

  We arrive to leave,

  Calling ourselves

  Cowards, but not you,

  Rufus. You make it

  To the George Washington—

  Bold as an officer of the law

  With the right to direct traffic

  When all the stoplights

  Are out—and you leap

  Dirty against the whiteness

  Of the sky to your escape

  Through the whiteness

  Of the water.

  The Water Lilies

  They open in the day and close at night.

  They are good at appearances. They are white.

  I judge them, judge the study they make

  Of themselves, aspirational beings, fake

  If you ask me. If you ask me, I’ll say no,

  Thank you, I don’t need to watch what goes

  Only imagining itself seen, don’t need

  To see them yawn their thin mouths and feed

  On light, absolute and unmoved. They remind

  Me of black people who see the movie

  About slaves and exit saying how they would

  Have fought to whip Legree with his own whip

  And walked away from the plantation,

  Their eyes raised to the sun, without going blind.

  Foreday in the Morning

  My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway

    toward her porch

  Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it

    color.

  She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was

    an American.

  But she’d say it was because she believed

  In God. I am ashamed of America

  And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite

  Of the timer set on my life to write

  These words: I love my mother. I love black women

  Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms

  Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them

  Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we

    are lazy,

  But I’d love to wake that bastard up

  At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under

    God

  Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk

  Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy

  To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave

    things green.

  The Card Tables

  Stop playing. You do remember the card tables,

  Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades,

  Short but standing straight

  Because we bent them into weak display.

  What didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim?

  How perfectly each surface was made

  For throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary

  Portion of our pay.

  And how could any of us get by

  With one in the way?

  Didn’t that bare square ask to be played

  On, beaten on the head, then folded, then put away,

  All so we could call ourselves safe

  Now that there was more room, a little more space?

  Bullet Points

  I will not shoot myself

  In the head, and I will not shoot myself

  In the back, and I will not hang myself

  With a trashbag, and if I do,

  I promise you, I will not do it

  In a police car while handcuffed

  Or in the jail cell of a town

  I only know the name of

  Because I have to drive through it

  To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

  But I promise you, I trust the maggots

  Who live beneath the floorboards

  Of my house to do what they must

  To any carcass more than I trust

  An officer of the law of the land

  To shut my eyes like a man

  Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

  So clean my mother could have used it

  To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will

  Do it the same way most Americans do,

  I promise you: cigarette smoke

  Or a piece of meat on which I choke

  Or so broke I freeze

  In one of these winters we keep

  Calling worst. I promise if you hear

  Of me dead anywhere near

  A cop, then that cop killed me. He took

  Me from us and left my body, which is,

  No matter what we’ve been taught,

  Greater than the settlement

  A city can pay a mother to stop crying,

  And more beautiful than the new bullet

  Fished from the folds of my brain.

  Duplex

  A poem is a gesture toward home.

  It makes dark demands I call my own.

  Memory makes demands darker than my own:

  My last love drove a burgundy car.

  My first love drove a burgundy car.

  He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

  Steadfast and awful, my tall father
/>
  Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

  Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark

  Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

  Like the sound of my mother weeping again,

  No sound beating ends where it began.

  None of the beaten end up how we began.

  A poem is a gesture toward home.

  The Trees

  In my front yard live three crape myrtles, crying trees

  We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing

  During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat

  Falling into us. I don’t want to make more of it.

  I’d like to let these spindly things be

  Since my gift for transformation here proves

  Useless now that I know everyone moves the same

  Whether moving in tears or moving

  To punch my face. A crape myrtle is

  A crape myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter. They are bare.

  It’s not that I love them

  Every day. It’s that I love them anyway.

  Second Language

  You come with a little

  Black string tied

  Around your tongue,

  Knotted to remind

  Where you came from

  And why you left

  Behind photographs

  Of people whose

  Names now buck

  Pronouncing. How

  Do you say God

  Now that the night

  Rises sooner? Why

  Must we wake to work

  Before any alarm?

  I am the man asking,

  The great-grandson

  Made so by the dead

  Tenant farmers promised

  A plot of woods to hew.

  They thought they could

  Own the dirt they were

  Bound to. In that part

  Of the country, a knot

  Is something you get

  After getting knocked

  Down, and story means

  Lie. In your plot

  Of the country, class

  Means school, this room

  Where we practice

  Words that undo your

  Tongue when you tell

  A lie or start a promise

  Or unravel like a story.

  After Avery R. Young

  Blk is not a country, but I live there

  Where even the youngest call you baby.

  Sometimes you ain’t we. Sometimes you is

  Everybody. Washboard rains come. We

 

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