send only smiles

send only smiles

(letter to pomona)

 

send only smiles

a small plaid happiness

plain packages with crisp numbers

lone yellow flower reaching

from morning in the frame of

fettered starling

and early eager bees

wink to let me know you are making it

your thimble of magic

fingernail full

clandestine super agent

taut as a mandela eye

a blue ant on mauve tile

inferred

 

remember me

i say

in a buoyant slang

an ocean clap

then the attendant tunnel vowels

droning up the coast

never turn our old corners

or rev your cadillac

never curse a red light

never drink and hear the brakes whince

come here saintly off the holy avenues

park the wide beautiful deville

settle high onto your shocks

 

or gallop lot to lot

handle a shapely sistuh

sharpen her ear with your tongue

refute a lie

hand up

eyes closed

and not remember me

 

say the best blue things

morning greetings

tall as beautiful brothas

earnest possibility

an 11 am brewing jazz

shrill clean skin

a noon of easy men

 

who have you seen?

quickwork dave with his  perm?

mr. moore whose hello

is a semi precious stone?

tootoo selling watches at ranch market

or my beautiful  judith,

still angry about her watch tower magazines?

tell her i love her

and always will

 

the world is endless

frescos of a turbaned malcolm

i want to show you

an iridescent dusk in nambia

pipe lines in god’s alaska

a chilean child’s ripe cheek

a rauckus ugandan band

 

have you been back to ganesha?

have you seen patrick’s sister who does yoruban dance?

how about our new karen?

 

make it simple

discriminate

a meridian

untaxable starched and white

tell me you will be there

a dutiful sentinel

i am always coming home

eye by eye

goodbye by good bye

 

i am what i am

a singer and a stranger

an expatriate lover

non-catholic roman in jeans

say you hold steady at home

say nothing will take you away

let it be a screen knocked upon

have your hello ready

let it be love and your parent’s cigarettes

a festival i can slip into

a tournament of kisses

new years in a hot crowded basement

a booth at tommys #12 seven brothas deep

and let me come

let me come

oh, let me come

and sleep

thomas hearns' right hand

thomas hearns’ right hand

 

wide in the face

flat and heavy as freight falling

fifteen feet onto the docks

a plough hitting a stone in a dark field

jerking the tractor round

blind and cattycornered

as two cadillac’s met  

coiled in a wide intersection

V-8’s still revving

pimps all a scatter  

featherclad and undone

 

it sent anyone spinning who got it

caught that flash of weight

and bore it reshaped

collapsed in the rising numbness

the bright end of war moving across

the variable interim like luminous lungs

jettisoned earth sphere in an atomic dreamscape

scattered and expanding

the new strange body blue

eyeless and crying

 

it was profanity among women

inappropriate yet beautiful

flowering exponentially red

the shrieking inhale of men

suddenly at blows with each other

the table scooting then toppling

hurrying fruit

the salt shakers tilting losing it

a rotating chair swinging hard west

into a large mirror

….and the mirror going crazy

gwendolyn brooks (1917-2000)

gwendolyn brooks (1917-2000)

second place winner at the USC Professional Writing Award Contest

 

short pay and weeks to go

tuesday is always toil

counting scars and the elements

aches that rise until the eyes brown

limited to what you can write and scream

you make a poem

 

the first flurries of snow are weeks away

there will be men laid off

all the strong white elephants off schedule

there will be absences and silences all over the city

engines will rev and snort snow

all the poems will be shards of coal

abandoned by his people

leonard will surely come addicted and asking

 

you would curse out the windows

make the cold colder

or damn each train shaking in the city’s veins

machines everywhere where men used to gather

 

but here this week

gwendolyn is joy

an oasis blue and warm as summer

you finally understand her

the brevity

the whisps of intense thought

you read then listen

are applicable to each vowel

this rancid anthology you found in an alley

she speaks and stands erect

points an ebony finger accusingly

and you are glad to be guilty

 

in her spectacles

the lenses making her eyes distant and wise

the city passes

is distilled and held a moment to catalog

even leonard’s wire silhouette

each fraction of each hurrying lonely face

carefully cottoned in space

 

you smile at a stanza in her poem

an awakening in summer

a shirtless free moment in san louis obispo

 

at a small table

on the news paper cloth

in a one bedroom apartment

on the second floor

one window facing the alley

the other framing leonard and

several gambling negros below

your tea has gotten cold

gwendolyn’s sermon has blessed you

the room makes fragrant bread all around you

 

winter echoes in the streets three empty countries away

yet gwendolyn speaks in the small place between

your belly and heart

calls you to work in the sandstone mornings

places butterfly sonnets at each adolescent lisp

 

you would find her if you could

somewhere in the city

in some far up window watching you go

claiming you

hoping you make it to the trains on time

up there letting the pies brown

you know she has something to give you

maybe the meaning of life

a poem written machine sharp

or directions to a field of late lilies