tuesday report to yedidiyah

your hair

a turbine

wild as a room of men

gambling eating

and laying about cursing

is the talk

because you are free woman

and it is saturday in the bright shine happiness

the gregarious frenzy of your locks

the ornate festival of your locks

the verb and salute of your locks

 

your eyes

july sun burnishing water

the gilded city healed and complete

laughing pistoning

licking the avenues to shine

under new sky

 

and fever

sistuh

makes me move

draw back my bitter face

james brown traversing a scream

and exclaim

 

(HEY!!!)

 

sistuh

your hair an october midnight

opaque with stars omens

is on your head like intellect

it churns conjures accuses

mimics winter in chicago

is full and forbidding among my pillows

sings and laments

 

i remember your locks

the brown of your cheeks

we were sitting in the aimless sermon

of the pontificating sunday 9 am

too early for the week

and too late to shake and jazz

you spoke in metaphors

angry about your job

the time away from life

missing your mother

and what the man demanded you be

     i almost got my gun

went down there

                          (i swear)

 

you lift your chin

when you don’t like something

a matriarch rejecting a lie

and your locks lay back

in sincere challenge

you aint having it

your hair says so

 

sometimes your locks invite me

strewn across your face

frames your left eye

maps your cheek and

points to your kiss

i move them away

so easy

they agree

and gather behind your beautiful ear

 

they don’t mind if i start there

where you are a child

stealing away late

listening to the 2 am city

then limp along to find the woman in your mouth

they don’t mind if i fall into the perfumed interim

between your breasts

and cry to you about love

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simple beauty

I think nuns are beautiful. Pious women who have grappled with their eroticism and come to understand it, made it contextually human, and came to live in penance, the austere understanding of divinity. They understand that people act out of need. And when the chaos of being frantic and desperate is done, the nuns bade us sleep. And not just nuns, but women who are in service to children, academia, whatever they give themselves to wholely, it’s on their face, the beautiful knowing and patience. Women who aid growth. Women who manage the silent aftermath

            I once knew a sistuh who I couldn’t lie to. Her eyes urged me to confide in her and mothered me toward saying truth. She was a healer. Some people are healers. They have a sense of things. And when I was stuck, ashamed or without understanding, she would touch me and create tactile community with me. Even with growing up a pastor’s kid, it was the closest thing I have ever done to true worship, other than making love or having such a sense of belonging to a woman that I felt brilliant.  

           This is to say my girl Liz is astoundingly beautiful, a lone yellow flower in a field of purple asters. She is not a nun, or anything like that. But she is clear and dedicated to something. Liz was a first grade teacher. She is like clarity in a mountain pass that comes suddenly with every sense of height and danger that makes the purpose of your journey irrelevant. Just when you swear the world has done away with beauty, and you have prepared yourself to live with your jaw tight, Liz if the rage against the pilfering of your joy. I am not sure if she knows. The best beauty is unaware and unconcerned. It is best framed by duty. You find it among the everyday chores at the stop lights, hurrying across a square of city sunlight.

           Beauty is simple, functional, and elegant. Say you travel to Monteray and pass unaware through Los Banos to find yourself driving and dreaming. A universe of incandescent sky and the rolling green hills in gentle expectation as if god was a woman who lay down to rest and pulled the earth over her hips and shoulders. A single tree that calls you to come is a single tear on the face of god, draws you toward it in solitary love. It knows what is beyond the horizon. It knows the secret and has grown to worship. Your heart begins to long for the horizon, to leave the car, the cats who are rolling with you, and go like Thoreau, the reward in the going, the transformation, the willing loss. Truly beautiful things hold loss, the whittling down to what is rich and absolute. Sometimes I am absolute as a lion. Sometimes I am chaffed down to fear and constituent to everything that seeks to destroy me. And I wear those things, sometimes.

            I am not sure how to finish this entry. Whatever I would say about Liz and real beauty would be redundant. Maybe beauty is like long division with a repeating remainder, like if you work the problem long enough you’ll find truth in the chant of numbers, that conscious place in you being honed, or the work will extend you beyond yourself towards an understanding of infinity, so far, so far that you can see John Burks Gillespie.