THE BLACK MARIA

I.

after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars.

“I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium… So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance… Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna… I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power.

And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”

—NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007

Body of space. Body of dark.

Body of light.

The Skyview apartments

circa 1973, a boy is

kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who

(it is important

to mention here his skin

is brown) prepares his telescope,

the weights & rods,

to better see the moon. His neighbor

(it is important to mention here

that she is white) calls the police

because she suspects the brown boy

of something, she does not know

what at first, then turns,

with her looking,

his telescope into a gun,

his duffel into a bag of objects

thieved from the neighbors’ houses

(maybe even hers) & the police

(it is important to mention

that statistically they

are also white) arrive to find

the boy who has been turned, by now,

into “the suspect,” on the roof

with a long, black lens, which is,

in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &

depending on who you are, reading this,

you know that the boy is in grave danger,

& you might have known

somewhere quiet in your gut,

you might have worried for him

in the white space between lines 5 & 6,

or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding

your breath for him right now

because you know this story,

it’s a true story, though,

miraculously, in this version

of the story, anyway,

the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives

to tell the police that he is studying

the night & moon & lives

long enough to offer them (the cops) a view

through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,

if I am spelling it out anyway,

is the instrument he borrowed

& the beautiful “trouble” he went through

lugging it up to the roof

to better see the leopard body of

space speckled with stars & the moon far off,

much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing

out) the distance between

the white neighbor who cannot see the boy

who is her neighbor, who,

in fact, is much nearer

to her than to the moon, the boy who

wants to understand the large

& gloriously un-human mysteries of

the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”

has not been killed by the murderous jury of

his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem

wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.

This boy on the roof of this poem

with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body

as I write this poem my body

is making a boy even as the radio

calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,

the Ohio coroner’s news.

2015. My boy will nod

for his milk & close his mouth around

the black eye of my nipple.

We will survive. How did it happen?

The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.

My milk pulling down into droplets of light

as the baby drinks & drinks them down

into the body that is his own, see it,

splayed & sighing as a star in my arms.

Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.

Maybe he will be (say it)

the boy on the coroner’s table

splayed & spangled

by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made

of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last.

Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning,

splendored with breaths, turned,

by time, into, at least, this song.

This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul”

caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net,

then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.

The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing

only things ordinary

as water & light.

 

II.

I, too, am built out of a question about the sky,

a body bearing things ordinary as light,

& when I realized this I was on my back, my legs

in the stirrups & the lights of the technician’s office

were dimmed as she slid the wand up

inside me after, like a room, the baby emptied

me, & “space” is what I thought

as the technician clicked her machine for a close-up

here & there & there, which was really all me &

the seeming limitlessness of my body’s dark,

how did I spend so many years dismarveling the body

its powers & beauties, thinking the world a place

I did not belong to, thinking myself alien,

though, of course, it was always ever my only home,

& in that room my heart, then, had a brazen dream & drew,

with its brown fingers, its own curtains back

so that I could see the courtyard inside it

where the peacocks swept the dirt

with the dark of their closed tails

within which the green burned secretly

like a fever & I saw my six words & their ghosts

& the mothers nodding

from beneath the pepper tree & a well

at the center of the yard of my heart,

& I held the dead-given pail

so lowered it down into my chest,

then up, &, like that, was taught

by the elders

to lift sorrow out

from my sorrow.

 

III.

This poem

wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.

This boy on the roof of this poem

with a moon in his heart.

Splayed & sighing as a star in my arms.

Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.

 

IV.

What verbs will I use

to describe the living of my beloveds?

Beloveds, if I love,

what language will I

love you in    If I see

what language will I use to see

& if I love & if I see

you    Then strike lines across

the terrorful verbs, write:

“love,” “study,” “make,” “disturb.”

 

V.

Somewhere I got the idea

to keep them separate:

this story from that one,

these stars from those,

the history of this sea from

the history of that sea.

Separating the body into territories

of easy sense while overhead,

the sky marked by light

is read in the constellations of

someone else’s myth.

But the angles I chart

abide by different sight

& hover up not

as bears or sisters but

a route dense with fires,

dark time adorned by

the messages of mirrors

saying: you are made with every where.

 

VI.

D. is in

the hospital room

& the white nurse, when she says

“He is lucky,” I know, means

not lucky to be “alive”

but lucky to be in “America”

as if he were not always

trying to get home,

as if there were not

trees & rivers there.

She speaks loudly.

Tries to remember

how to connect.

Tries to rush through.

Her English is an Empire

and imagines only itself.

We tell her in our way:

Slow down,

not your language, but

your eye.

See him.

Body of sight. Body of

breaths. Body of trying.

How he carries his weight, even now,

with great effort, so as not to burden

you.

But her job, this country

does not require this of her

so she is gone already,

already out of sight, & doors.

 

VII.

Body of sight. Body of

breaths. Body of trying.

Beloved, to

day you eat,

today you bathe, today

you laugh

Today you walk,

today you read,

today you paint, my love,

Today you study stars,

today you write,

today you climb the stairs,

Today you run,

today you see,

today you talk,

You cut the basil

You sweep the floor

& as you chore, touch

the ankles & hairs of your befores

who look up from their work

in the field or at the chisel

to tell you in their ways: You Live!

 

VIII.

How did it happen?

The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.

The body, bearing something ordinary as light                Opens

as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns &

bears the child—out.

When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of

it all, the push & head

not moving, not an inch until,

when he flew from me, it was the night who came

flying through me with all its hair,

the immense terror of his face & noise.

I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed

a love him vow. His struggling, merely, to be

split me down, with the axe, to two. How true,

the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here.

The fight, first, to open, then to breathe,

& then to close. Each of us entering the world

& entering the world like this.

Soft. Unlikely.   Then—

the idiosyncratic minds & verbs.

Beloveds, making your ways

to & away from us, always, across the centuries,

inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this iteration

of you or you or me might come to be at all—Body of fear,

Body of laughing—& even last a second. This fact should make us fall all

to our knees with awe,

the beauty of it against these odds,

the stacks & stacks of near misses

& slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next.

Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see.

& so to tenderness I add my action.