losing marie paule

 

 

 

-downtown is thousands of

floors above us where

the sentinels meet at the cistern and

jigsaw blue

it is so new to you

everything here

even after a year of trains and bells

i still find you looking up

watching the scheduled squares of city sky

the partitioned sun falling down towers into sound

and being tired on busses

where common people stood still

in the clamor and dogma of the country’s machinery

refusing to create poems

and celebrate themselves

 

i love that about you

the way you feel about things

how jazz fascinates your fingers

george benson

the africanesque of his guitar and voice

made you come to my room

asking was he from senegal

you wanting to kiss me in the dining hall

but had been informed not

to be too forward with americans

you fall so easily

i love to catch you and

laugh strong in present tenses

and when you told me you loved me

the diplomat in you speaking for the

shy african girl

it was more real than pain

i was naked

like children in first sight of the elephants

 

but saturday

you are leaving

going home to your people and country

that news comes as

an errant voice in the loitering cacophony

an angry griot calling my sins

come here loud and dark

a tense face from famine

 

everywhere

the shirley horn trio is in slow blue samba

a stirring snare drum forecasting winter

expanding symbol like sheer rain

i cannot escape it

men are sad

women overworked and pious

children shoeless in rain

yet this small bit of denial has sustained me

i eat it slowly and stay with you

each night i listen to you breathe

each breath a small cloud gathering in coming winter

winter will be a lonely hand in an empty pocket

a season of ornate absences

a conversation ending in silences and snow flurries

 

three days until saturday

my journal is full of blue poems

on one page

i drew my own eyes

they tell me to catalog each moment

to linger everywhere we are together

rush to you and keep you

on the next page a sonnet

but i have never been good at metered verse

everything is against us

            even literature

each car horn bellows it out

each door click letting go a notch wound to my wrist

but there are always planes somewhere leaving

always someone in a new liturgy of blues

returning to the city alone

walking into winter where the birds change color

the connections change

it’s the new vacancy in apartment # 12

it’s in the lone pot screaming from the neighbor’s stove

it’s in the empty busses at 1 am transferring spirits

it’s in the windows like night

and in the whites of my eyes

 

his cigarette lights

 

his cigarette lights

morning comes across his hands

and he lingers at the light like a wildflower

long enough to be absent and abstract

someone three cars back

in the pell-mell hour

screams honks twice

jerks so hard the car whines and jostles

traffic finally moves

the 2nd car makes a right west

toward the sea and early sun

the sea is billowy and young

and not yet green

inflates the morning with sound

seagull struggles in the tempest

dives through the emptiness  

a woman watching him go

that fast loses him in the loud blue

she secures her hat her dress

straining against her thighs and breasts

finds herself exposed

adjusts her mouth to see what the

next breath holds

the next breath stirs the young man

who meets the girl whose laughter is

as easy an elation as wearing new shoes

kisses her behind the oleanders at the pier

the cats catch him definitionless in the half sun

the cats are a spectrum of sun

and the pier is 12 miles long

a group of resolute men are going to the end

but won’t wait for me

i have so many things to gather

strewn about on the ground

and i am blinking blue  

straining in the rising flashes of light

now citizen with no antecedent  no story

coming into the wide port morning

my small cargo of wilting words

like static when the city rises

the transmissions etch incoherent

the translucent randomness

an echo of laughter

two strong seconds of song

one minute of tuning whine

and somewhere in a quarter hour of haze

an announcement in tagalog

the people have appeared

the people have appeared

even the lovers who have made this their place

for she attends cosmetology academy

and he is a young custodian at the school district

she moves his hair back over his ears

he cleans her face with his kisses

                                                            

 

and each day where the

scheduled squares of city sky

framework the afternoon

and change reference as

the sun slants the bright loud hour

they arrive in the legislated garden

of the bank building atrium

and sit on the dark watersheen marble

 

outside the blvd veers right at them

down a short hill to the plaza

people come and go

a meter maid moves between the parked cars

and a push of starling volleys into air

up the mathematics of windows

toward the partitioned sky

 

 

she has cut her hair

she turns to let him see her neckline

it would be perfect to kiss the swallow of it

the movement into her earthen shoulder

over her right breastand watch the red lights stammer

the UPS truck ease into shadow

her knee begin to shine

 

they leave

and noon darkens into afternoon

the meter clicks and skyscrapers begin to piston

the atrium sprinklers tuft and spray

for 5 allotted minutes on a pruned hedge

and the small leaves grow wet and black green

like love

for joy

(i marginal
 i omitted
 i incongruent and

 off center square)

 

joy
those people who bark at you
who make gutteral noises
and imitate your heaviness
who find their hipness
standing square on your's
don't know that
your mother may wish you were different
and that when you come home on christmas break
she takes exception to your short hair

and your dark skin

and never asks if you have romance

never the pretty conversations of

how to coo no’s in a suitor’s ear

just the oblivion of your sexless body

the large plaid nothingness of you

and your father explains to company

during his genteel moments

when he conjures his big words
that you are ugly but sweet

and calls you from the den to say hello

invites the guests to touch the ugliness
and your mother challenges you for wearing red
and that maybe you hanging your head
is a hundred yrs old

why should you show your eyes

who would respond to the longing

or catch the first flash of winter in your silent tear?
they will not know

that your mother was made at the
expense of a fair skinned world

and beaten away from her beauty

and they said mutilate yourself to be pretty

and she did

and they said corrupt your children to be pretty

and she did

and when she saw herself eligible to be american woman

you arrived in her life

like a curse growing ever blacker at her tit

birmingham poem #2

how do we survive today

this season of lynchings

this hysterical blackness beat back

onto our gums like dry blood

this slow crippling and rancid incense

this monday on fire with morning?

          but you don’t hear me

we would be indicted by greeting

two negros at this conference

our unspecial specialness

how we talk the way we do

the square we transmit from this morning

the genteel enunciations of race

from happy slaves

 

i am in orbit around sorrow

always in darkness

satellite in a mist of evaporated tears

 

i understand the slowness

the rehearsed answers clicking between our teeth

the interim ache

pause and response

 

you have gotten the news

brotha, i know you have

your eyes drift to see their spirits pass

the birmingham girls

harvested in greenest youth

 

the death toll has reached you

 

 

grandmother

my grandmother

sits on the couch

and we thought we were silly

thought

laughter was the invention

of our strong teeth

that we were lean black

magnificent

homogeneus in our stride

and grandmother is watching

       we run in and out

bring the day back through

the livingroom

in shimmering bands

of gold yellow and blue

and how strong we are

fences fly beneath us

we chainlink the world

cover cadilacs in single steps

and grandmother is reading

while we dance the doowop

and throw our hands

oh, how straight we are

the elegant lines between our joints

our fingers crooking

into the air like knotty black branches

my brother john trips

his cut off shorts rip

all our sides quiver

laughter wells up strong

but grandmother is watching

we soar we float

we constrain our smiles we hide

we breathe in the dazzling morning

we fall apart inside

and whatan unexpected sight

grandmother is bubbling

tearing bouncing beneath her weight

and the common air between us

like an ocean come home

is ancient

and beautiful

for a father

no

you cannot protect him

cannot carry him

heavy as he is

solid as he is

loud as he is

he is your son

the excavation of your hope

the enormous thing you have done

and honed and made outlandishly beautiful

he is the speed and quickness

leaps against you and loves you

has your eyes and temper

the incantation of his birth

pronounced his freedom

he believes he can  out holler traffic

outback deep shadows

spend the summer shirtless in the city patterns

and obliviously stroll through the cacophony

of scheduled alarms

he yells

the city yells back

both of them grinning

standing against the weather

no

you cannot protect him

cannot prescribe his movement when

girls call and talk slow

and he learns to hoard and handle heat

out there

his shadow imposes itself

grows a godhand across the electric avenues                               

close to his face

his hand can cover the sun

…..and you watch him longing in the

deep wet kiss of his youth

he is your child

and though you disagree

warn him of dangers harboring         

unused absences behind dark doorways

hidden and greedy along the midnight interim

though you bade him be careful

still

the iron of his shoulders is impressive

his height so sudden and pleasing

his eyes clear full of future

not aware of any loss

and you know he is entering the grand summers

as you watch him leaving the yard

unencumbered

in perfect skin