Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released
Rather than the eyes,
It was the visions
Which were often
The climax of the Ceremony
God is also a prophet
For the ecstatic and the
Maniac have fanatical powers.
—Euripides
The Bacchae 298-31
I
Euripides Toussaint glided forward
On stilts which punched the soft sand
After the drums stilled.
He was naked except for
An elaborate painted mask
That was over life-sized and covered his face
A mud encrusted wig of horsehair
And wool hung down his back to his knees
His yellow-framed pupils were
Dilated with bhang,
His head moved to the rhythm
Of the tantara and the catalepsy.
A chorus swelled around him of
Women’s ululations and sibilations
Which he imbibed like wine
Head thrown back, he swallowed their
Mass hysteria so that it animated him
To new acrobatic heights
When God enters a person in force
He causes madness in him
That can predict the future.
Lifting his knees high and
Stomping down the earth
Splattering blood from a disgorged fowl
Contaminating the congregation
Splashing his upraised arms
As he held high the carcass
Still twitching in strangulation’s
Throes above the mask allowing the liquid
To stain his bare feet
And spot shorn white feathers which
Flutter amongst the instruments
Falling like alien snowflakes to the ground,
Floating like white humming birds
Amongst the implements of sorcery and
The rites laid out on hallowed earth.
II
The women’s bodies were shaking now,
In other worldly trances and traumas
Skirts lifted high in pagan figurations
Composed ten thousand years
Before the Christian Era
Damsels derived from Mother Lucy
And homines erecti in Eden
Transformed by Novocain
Into zombies: the living dead
Cousins to vampires with the powers
Of the undead elected before recorded
Time and its conceit of pre-history.
Those obedient to the King of the
Underworld will show you
Great kindness and will allow
You to drink the waters of memory
And you will be transplanted
To a place far away, along
The scared way taken by
Other glorious mystics.
—Orphic leaf from Hipponion
What are you looking for here,
In the new world
In Brazil and Cuba, Haiti?
Uruguay Argentina, Puerto Rico and
The Dominican Republic,
Louisiana and North Carolina?
Wherever the Kingdom of Maria is
That which no one expects
The inaccessible or merely the unattainable
Or is this a Catholic conversion
A virgin as young and as fair as the
Antichrist, the Love goddess Erzulie?
III
Or Gru, the god of war,
Sakpata, the god of smallpox and sickness
Or Hebieso, the god of fire.
Euripides Toussaint shook his palm leaf
Broom and his musical gourd
Swelling with the milk of the Congo
Bathing the goddess of fecundity
Who abides in the Manui Ata Ocean which
means “I squeeze my thighs”
Producing a violent and transforming
Orgasm in the women who relay in
Ecstasy, tearing off their clothes falling
Onto the beaten turf, chanting for sexual
Release, rigid with cunt apoplexy as
Desire becomes epileptic,
Pushing out buttocks and breasts
Opening knees, entering orifices and
Virginian throughways like poisonous vipers,
White as mourning
Like the aura of possession
Which speaks in tongues and searches
For male and female transfiguration
As their ululations become louder and louder
Tongues stick to the roofs of mouths
Spittle dribbles from lips like swallowed sperm,
Answered prayers are drumbeats
Transforming bodies into roaming zombies,
Impervious to fire, sweat, tears,
Oil and Holy Water, drunk on
Rum, beer and cocaine shavings,
Cocktails of secret cults and initiates
Transmitting their mysteries to
Memory’s knots.
IV
Those sealed and inscrutable lips
Unparted without a word passed from
The unalterable chain of the un-fathomable,
Mouths iron clad against the treachery
Of clan betrayal and the drums’ message
With their antique remembrances of
Centuries past, of other oceans and seas
Of slaves and torture, suicide and rape
No wonder the ex-colonials want to expunge
The memory of vampirism, zombie worship
Ritual sacrifice, fornication and the
Penetration of women:
The sacred prostitute placed on a litter
In a supine position covered with
Wild Fougere, orchids and lilies
Who is wept over in regular lament
Falling in childlike cadences,
Satisfied with these false ceremonies of mourning,
A lamp is brought and a priest
Oils the throats of all those crying
And then slits each throat, one by one,
Murmuring in a slow whisper:
“Do not fear initiates: God is here
Though He is only sand
Which flows in your bloodstream,
For you, there will be
Salvation from evil …”
You bury one idol, you weep for
One other, you remove one idol
From the tomb
—Firmicus Maturnus
The Error of Pagan Religions 22-1-3
Having seen the Mysterias,
And the Revelations, I have
Raised the dead numerous times
—Mysteria-The Rites of Eleusinian
from the Greek Myelin—to close the mouth
V
Euripides Toussaint still on his stilts,
Genuflects to the knowledge that tells
Us more than that which we actually see.
That night, amongst the wailing women
He serviced, he raised the dead once again
Happy that he was among the men who had seen
These things and had taken part in the
Sacred rites and as a result would have
A different destiny than those who had not
When it was his turn to die he thought and he was
Dead and gone down to darkness and gloom
There would be a different ending,
There would be a spring and next to it
A river and next to that
A white cypress and a purple coconut tree
Where the souls of the dead
Go to be resurrected and play instruments,
Do not ever go near the spring
For it is poisonous and brackish
But go further ahead and you will
Find fresh clear water
Which runs into Memory’s swamp
And there the dancing women stop cold
Pull up their dresses, undress, recover flushed with sex
Wondering if they have copulated with Euripides Toussaint
But he reveals nothing passing for the undead
The drums are quiet and night is navy blue
As they return to their huts of earth, straw and mahogany
Walking on foot, slowly, drunk on
Nothing but air and music
and Memory’s knot.
VI
Someone asked the exhausted Euripides
Why he searched in the gloomy Shadows of Hell
To which he replied, “I am the son of Earth,
The guardian of the moon and the starry sky”
(In this way, the women recognized his divine origin
And that they had copulated with a God)
“My throat is dry, I burn with thirst
I feel myself on the edge of death
Give me some fresh water.”
“Because of you, the dead have risen
Vampires walk the earth and zombies
Of all races now roam amongst us”
“Those alive when the moon rises
Who are mortal, die of my kisses.” says
Euripides drawing back and embracing
One of the women who has fallen
Behind the others and raises her up
To his stilted height without touching her.
She gives a shudder like falcon feathers,
Settling on the perch of his arm and
Offers her throat which he kisses
Then drinks deeply from the Knot of
Memory as he wrings the tilted neck
And places it on the stilt as if it were a pike.
Listening to the fading drums,
Because the undead were loose
To do as they pleased.
Capri
I possess a belvedere on Tiberius’ beloved Island,
A great stand of Mediterranean Pines, Arcadians and fig trees
Planted on the edge of the known world,
From which you can see Africa,
The terrain is rough and spiked with lavender,
With edges that descend down to the blue grotto beneath,
Of mauve rock, oleander, clover and cactus which
Jut out like Cleopatra’s pouting lips.
Generals and Roman spirits wander there,
Mingling with Krupp’s ghost and his boys who once
Before me owned this garden and sometimes I hear his
Germanic Voice colliding in argument about the last
Roman Empire and the lost i, 000-year Reich
Strolling along Kupp’s Way and listening to
The clash of armies framed by the glacier white horizon
Where naval battles long past took place surrounded by
Fire, smoke and manned galley slave ships.
Below me is the eerie depth of the Blue Lagoon
Where water spirits dwell and cough up white foam
Filled with the sound of harps and bagpipes,
Stringed intruments and conch shells, it is where
I feel safest, as the emperor must have with his palace guards,
Safe from the intrigues and assassination attempts of Imperial
Rome surrounded by mercenaries and bodyguards.
Fragrance groans under its own weight, lauding the air
With a mulitiplicity of smells, butterflies and bees that
Go mad and color fades defeated by another oriflamme
Caressing like a lover’s hand, playing on skin
Like melting sun and the frigid sea surf meeting
In a volptuous embrace, each hiding the dagger of a murderer
Under his cloak, bent on redefining the Empire
Threatened by foreigners, immigrants and barbarian.
Long ago someone offered to sell me this Eden,
Over dinner in another dreamland; Hollywood,
And as if in trance I raised my hand and nodded
“I do” and betrothed myself to this place like a proxy bride
Never having seen my bridegroom, taking it as my spouse,
This swooning garden as sacred Fanum
Where once lionesses roared and leopards pranced
To the delectation of bloodied aristrocrats.
All the famed and powerful of this world
Passed by here absorbed like field mice:
Cocteau, le Corbusier, Trotsky, Gorky, Gide,
Picasso, and Oscar Wilde ignoring tourists,
Invading this Bronze Age Island until the last boat load
Sail for Naples at seven PM and the 21st century inhabitants
Suddenly appear in the piazetta from their shuttered villas,
Ready for their aperitif and the re-conquest of their island.
At times I forget the allure of Kapros, the wild boar,
In its insolence and insomnia, dreaming only of
The fanaglioni rising from the sea and the emperor’s feast,
And what I might have done if so many of its illustrious
Had not already made this paradise their own,
Its victories like breathing air, its defeats and destruction
Only a passing breeze without a marker or anchor,
A unique miracle, producing only beauty and the fear of loosing it.
White swallows nest among the blossoming bougainvillea,
Queen Anne lace amongst the shimmering dark green and violet,
Storks nest in the ruins of Roman columns marching to the Cercosa
As I take my walk amongst fluttering arteries of my life,
Along the chafing Tyrrhenian Sea below, a dizzying leap,
And beyond, two spectral rocks drenched in amber light
Ground by centuries into the historical stillness of age,
I though I saw Tiberius’ golden eagle fly east.
Under the Caprician Chalk Moon
Under the Caprician chalk moon,
A white porcelain ribbon
Named Krupp’s Way unravels itself
Towards the Blue Grotto beneath,
Carved into mountain and rock,
It dances alone, flitting from
Cliff to cliff cavorting
Down the ravine in virginal white
Emptiness, unallied, uninhabited
Except for the frosted light,
Wildly, sleeves and skirt lifted
By legendary nautical winds
Headscarf billowing behind,
Leaving footsteps like Isadora Duncan,
Stepping in and out of the shadows,
Gliding, striding, bending, swaying,
Weeping arms waving like date palms
As they follow bodily movements
Dangerous to perform with the
Plunge into the churning sea,
Only a pale protruding inch away
Ready to devour the slightest
Mistaken step, a path
Off limits to pedestrians,
Corseted with wire mesh to keep
Falling stones from breaking limbs
Instead of tumbling into the deep
Purple waters almost a mile below,
Only ghosts from the 20’s
Dare to two-step to this clinging phantom music,
Pelicans and storks swoop by
On their way to other islands further
South, their alabaster bills encased in glow
As if flight was all there ever was,
Their feathery white and black backs
Outlined in radiance, ruffled
By oceanic breezes that wrap
Themselves around this island beyond time,
And perturb Isadora’s tangled scarf.
Winter Flood
Ah my darling beloved old man,
With white hair and topaz eyes,
Touch my forehead, touch my shoulder
As the Lucite sun of winter
Streams across our residence of corporal
Destruction, all bodily divinity
Diminished and dissected from that state
Of adoration that consumed it for so long
When it was summer and our bodies
Were vast landscapes of jade wheat
And emerald corn stalks swaying
Ripe for harvest untouched by
Disease or rot, blight or frost or
Northerly winds that would have scraped the
Bloom from our collateral beauty
And the right to mourn it.
Touch my forehead, touch my shoulder,
That once shuddered under such provocation
Warming like the rising tide of a river still
Irrigating coveted and fertile flesh
With cries of lust and groans of happiness
As spring blew soft rain and loose petals
Fell and willows bled semen and birches sang
Root and limb growing together as did
Grain and husk, chafe and rice, pea and pod
Inseparable from our youthful arrogance
Never dreaming one day that age and decrepitude would
Come lie beside our rustling and breathing
Bringing giant gales of discontent that rage
Across the phantom moons of green pastures
Dispersing a whiff of musk from lavender fields
Ancient battle grounds of war and maiming
Nothing prepared us for winter floods
Touch my forehead, touch my shoulder
Lying in puddles of non-consummation
My head rests quietly on your heart,
And still banks as we watch our river
Swoon and swell with the monsoon and
The flood’s arrival destroys
Our house built on stilts.
Leave the door open
I
Leave the door open
After I’ve walked through it.
I’ll start from there not here,
From the end, not the beginning
I’ll look back only once, so that
I can remember you standing there,
Your long polished body framed
By luminosity like Leonardo’s
Universal man; handsome, black haired
Smooth muscled, arrogant in soft down,
Brown eyed, soft lipped, narrow limbed,
Whose hand I fell in love with
Taking change at a toll booth on the freeway.
II
Leave the door open
After I’ve walked through it
So I’ll know that this
Whispering flight from you
Is not the end, but a parenthesis:
An illusion that I can find my way back
From intolerable absence
Through a crack
In the door,
With only a crescent of light,
Just enough to keep me alive in an exiled world,
An unyielding universe of solitude,
Planetary loneliness for lunch and dinner
Famine rationed to sack of grain,
I’ll forget you the day I die.
White Peony Petals
Peony petals floated upon the rumpled white square
Of my first love’s bed, scattered and crushed
Into the sign of a crescent, its neon fading
In the dawn’s loveliness which awake
Echos of the night before gushing love
Laid side by side on a stone beach,
Tide drenched in sand snails and medusas
Escaped from our own ruminated depths.
The Han Princess of Via Jacopino
A Han princess greets me every morning with
A creamy cup of steaming cappuccino,
This perfect throwback to the dynasty of Empress Wu,
Almond eyes lowered, chin drawn in, two small
Dimples carved into the suppleness of the white oval
Of her eternal countenance, a refugee from Sachow,
Who doesn’t speak a word of Italian, English, or French,
An illegal alien straight off the boat with her
Shy smile and Hanchow accented Mandarin, her
Silhouette etched against stylized painted clouds
Of a 5th century scroll painting, upswept hair and
Elaborate flowing white robes drawn in ink in the
Exquisite style known as Wei hu, confused
With the line of slot machines and Coca Cola signs that
Line the walls of the Jolly Bar in Milan.
Pale daughter of a 5th century court magician,
This lacquered white porcelain doll bends like bamboo,
As thin as rice paper, no breasts, no buttocks,
No hips, only one long exquisite curve of an extended
Brushstroke applied to silk by a master calligrapher,
Her sublime posture the perfect rendition of her soul
Not standing in an Italian bar but in the stone gardens
Of the Forbidden City—luminous in Red,
White Kimonos reincarnating—the once cherished
Princess, Lu Chung, ruler of dreams and Palaces,
Summer pavilions enclosed by endless parallel walks
Along which she glides head bowed in submission,
A vivid ink stroke of life, livid and electrifying
As the graffiti scrawled on scarlet bricks
Her pale lotus flower mouth pursed in a secret smile.
The timeless face floats in ether, expressionless except in love,
Hurries to a secret assignation, carried by prancing porters,
Followed by mute eunuchs from the emperor’s harem,
A line of ink blots stretched along her red prison,
The slim graceful figure reclining, eyes watchful behind silk curtains
No more than a sliver of existence, a hand that suddenly
Extends out of the baldaquin’s veil in a nervous flutter.
The sound of cascading coins which spill
Out over the gray tile floor, breaks the spell, an habituee
Who has been playing the slot machines all morning, has hit the jackpot,
His victory cry startles the princess who wordlessly hands me my cappuccino,
Her pale tapered fingers still curved around its rim, I open my morning paper
And wonder how long it will take some smitten Italian boy to rescue the
Imprisoned princess from the Jolly Bar; three months I calculate
Less time than Pushkin’s grandfather took to measure the Great Wall of China.
Hela
My name was Henrietta Lacks
But doctors knew me only
As Hela
The name they gave my
Immortal cells,
Cells that have survived
For 50 years beyond
My mortal remains,
50 metric tons of
Immortality
Reproducing themselves into eternity
A universe discovered:
Polio vaccine
The secrets of cancer,
Vitro-fertilization,
Weightlessness in space,
DNA and cloning,
I was bought and sold
Like my ancestors before me
By the billions.
It didn’t seem to matter
That my cells were colored
For the first time, no one cared
From the Negro ward of Johns Hopkins
They appropriated all of them
Without my permission
Nor consent
These miracle cells that
Invaded white porcelain laboratories
And labyrinths of medical freezers
With their Frankenstein possibilities
To make History all over the planet,
Far from my white Birch
Slave cabin town of Clover, Virginia
A place like myself that no longer exists
Of voodoo and faith healings
Except …
My legacy was not Faith
But the multi-billion dollar
Biotech industry.
My human biological material
None of which my children inherited
None of which profited me
None of which was recognized
As the stuff:
It was made of
This cornucopia of DNA
Which is even now
Still giving and still living
In beauty and abundance
Studded with my pearls of pain
Strings of them flooding
The surface of liver, diaphragm,
Bladder, intestine, appendix, rectum,
Heart, ovaries, and fallopian tubes,
All gray and pearly with invasive cancer.
A portrait of Dorian Gray
The suffering of the Crucifixion
Fever and delirious, vomiting and poison
Excruciating agony.
Another steel day dawning
At the tobacco auction barn
Only a mile away
From my four room cabin,
The horror of abandoning
Two baby girls;
My beloved if mediocre
Husband,
I floated from carnage to cadaver,
Split open on the autopsy slab
A conspiracy of cancer cells,
A universe of cancer cells,
A Milky Way of cancer cells,
A galaxy of effervescent stars
That still lives while I die.
Enough to drive anyone insane
Cancer cells …
Swimming in homemade culture
Dividing themselves spontaneously
Every second for sixty-eight years.
Cancer cells
That danced to their own tune,
With their own secrets,
Exactly like creation.
Carcinoma of the cervix:
The DNA of the nucleus
A fabulous lemon yellow,
The action filaments
Light cerulean blue.
The mitochondria a shocking pink,
Monster cells as beautiful as a
Kandinsky abstraction.
My eleventh chromosome
A virulent masterpiece of evil
Metamorphosing themselves on their own,
Angels of Satan called fluorescence in situ,
Hybridization where fish glow with
Multicolored dyes like multicolored fireflies:
A sapphire sky in eerie radium blue,
Punishing Henrietta for being sick.
Rewarding Axel with a
Nobel Prize …
But not Hela,
How about an honorary Nobel for the legend?
A Thank You to the goddess of eternal healing?
Or posthumously to her daughter?
For injecting HIV into cells to
Learn how to infect 100%
Postulating if DNA should be altered without
The permission of God Almighty
Dividing indefinitely,
Never growing old and never dying,
These Hela cells of devastating
Resplendence and obstination,
Proving there is no wisdom
And no old age
And just possibly no death …
Except that of Henrietta Lacks,
Resting now in an unknown,
Unmarked grave.
The Rape of a Chambermaid
You tell me to go lie down on the bed,
But if you knew what I find in my bed,
You would not ask me to go there
The same bed I tear apart each morning
From the leavings of the night before;
Bodies naked or clothed, secretions
Semen, screams of pleasure or pain
Phlegm, blood, night sweat, odors of
Love and gropings saline or salacious breath
I fling the linen shrouds of last night’s garbage
Up and away to morning’s bright yawn adumbrating
Other strangers’ limpid flesh impounded on white freshness;
A new icy ironed sheet unfolds like blown sails
Filling my wide flung arms, coxing the rampaging veil
Onto the box spring, taming the jagged edges into smoothness,
A white sinless prairie awaiting the next homesteader
A tourist from Nebraska, a Nabob from Shanghai for this is a
International Hotel suite, five starred and accredited
For the rich and famous and wannabes’ crushing vanity,
Making their way in the world as I do mine except in the Bronx,
That untamed wilderness just north of Manhattan,
A no-man’s land from which I emerge each morning showered and scrubbed
At 5 a.m. for the two-hour train ride to the mirrored and carpeted safety
I lied myself into from the barbed wire refugee camp I lied my way out of,
Lies that weigh lightly on my soul considering that lies
Are the linguafranca of the Bronx, the busy signal of the
Six hundred thousand cell phones that ring and ring and ring
At all hours of the day and night in desperate chorus on its
Streets and highways, alleys and parking lots, bars and diners,
While 15 year olds play basketball on glass strewn macadam
I believed myself to be alone, in an empty room with bleached linen,
Miniature soap, clean towels, a noisy vacuum cleaner,
So I do not perceive him or hear his naked feet
Suddenly a long shadow darkens the bedclothes
Ink wings of burnt flesh and macadam feathers
Reach out from the bathroom shower to incase me
One hand penetrates deep into my vagina,
The fingers of the other hand thrust deep into my throat
So no cry for help can escape me
Unable to move or scream under the double bind,
Thrown to the floor and held there under suffocating weight,
The full specter of Hellish rape appears
The stranger’s strange body is livid and naked
Against my starched uniform, trussed up in a
Silent movie of flashing sheets, flesh and penetrating pain,
Vomit and spleen burst from my impaled body’
Strangled and skewed like fowl,
Violated from throat to anus
A phallic tank destroying the no-man’s land between
Human and beast, burning breath rank and rabid assail
My senses fighting unconsciousness twisting helplessly on this split
Horn still embedded in me, hope shredded that this is
Only nightmare not attempted murder: a hard slap across the face
“You tell and you’re fired Bitch.”
A trickle of blood escapes my uncorked throat
From which pours a stream of vomit, semen and shame
The pike of pain withdrawn, my head upon it
Still mute, peace is all that’s left to live for
My mouth full of come I flee into the darkness of
The linen closet to die and die.
The suite is empty now and calm, its horned occupant
Disguised as human has checked out downstairs
With his gleaming platinum American Express card.
Voile curtains sweep breezes across the still unmade bed,
I hurry to clean the next room in the 27 minutes allotted,
Afraid I will be reprimanded like a convict
For loitering on the job.
Akhmatova’s Centotaph
Whose victory was it?
I don’t know.
Perhaps poetry itself?
Certainly Pushkin and Pasternak were there
A multitude stood before her tomb
Bareheaded in Leningrad’s March winds,
Boys and girls recited her verse by heart
From two or three in the afternoon
Until the light leaped away and darkness crept in
At ten when it was still tricky white night,
And everything shone without the sun
Which wrapped itself around harsh throats congested
With unreleased tears and KGB agents who
Mingled everywhere watching and taking notes,
The crowd advanced slowly on foot following the sepulcher
Through the miniscule cemetary flanked
By pale hills pierced with black pines
Until it reached a bouquet of Evergreens
Men without hats, women without scarves,
Who dares to disturb them?
They have their rights: the right of grief
The right of vengance, the right of memory
The right of broken heartedness, the right of
Mothers, sisters, brothers, students all claiming
Relief—against death and oblivion, authority
Censure, terror, oppression and for instruction
Resistance, humanity, the rights of man
The coffin is crowned with ribbons and blossoms,
The air of triumph and victory, the music in everyone’s head is
That of Richter playing Prokofiev’s Possession
All the old women stood straight and tall
Maria Yudina, Nina Tabidze, Vana Khalturina
Olga Iriskala, Rita Wright Kovaleva, Maria Petrovykh
Marina Chukovskaya, Lydia Chukovskaya
Natasha Pavlenko, Frida Vigdorova
Old women with graying hair and ravaged faces
Though they like she had all been beauties,
Aligned like the surrounding cypresses
As dark as death they scrutinized each other
Searching for those already dead ghosts: Boris, Osip, Marina
All dead before her, Tsvetaeva a sucide; Mandelstam hounded
To death by Stalin; Pasternak exiled
Old friends, old enemies, old lovers, old prisonmates
Joined in pain, in torture, in mouning, in perfidy
The tiny cemetary packed with the crowd’s sneaking shadows
Overrun the walls and line up in silence as if awaiting
A firing squad—no one cries “long live the Revolution”
But a boy recites Pasternak’s Hamlet
There is no Christian voice—no theologian
As if Akhmatova had not been a Russian Orthodox
Only the verses chanted by heart by young people proved it;
Poem without hero, Rosary, Plantain, Requiem
KGB agents reappeared like sprouting mushrooms
The fresh tomb yawned and opened its arms
Embracing clumps of deaf and dumb earth
The coffin groaned into its place like a tulip bulb
Under the hail of clay and dirt that blinded all,
“Deafened” as Pushkin would say “by the noise of inner anxiety”
This solitude is nothing like the solitude of the before,
This solitude is either the ultimate prison or the passage to Paradise
Which will never erace the voice we still hear
From beyond the grave, you hear her voice
And you accord it faith
Whose victory was it?
I don’t know
Perhaps poetry itself
Arabesque to Frank’s Rivers
All the different degrees of goodness
In painting may be reduced to the
Mediocre, or indifferently good
The excellent and the sublime
The sublime therefore must be marvelous and surprising
It must strike vehemently upon the mind
And fill and captivate it irresistibly
—Jonathan Richardson, 1719
I
I picture you with your black Fedora and gold rim glasses
In one of those strange aboriginal canoes navigating
The lusty currents of the four great rivers of your life
The Essequibo, the Berbice, the Hudson, and the Thames
Between the dawn and the dusk one finds in their dregs;
Each, not only moving water, but memories of light
II
My, you were handsome, black bearded and strong,
Impossible to look at and not love,
Bewitched by your own nautical surfaces, so thick
They stopped floods; that terse sunset of yellow, that melancholy
Mellow sky, Grenadine sprinkled with specks of gold, making it
Hard to understand whether it was the end of the day, or the end of the world.
III
Luminous color, floats like a vessel on somebody else’s reverie
Evokes the Essenquibo which never knows in which
Direction it flows, black ink running through emerald green,
With Gyuanian slices of red and magenta all curled up
In tropical cobalt blue and before you knew it you were
Painting the portrait of a place you would soon forget
IV
Splendid and dreadful tides come and leave
Ebbing and rising with the Monsoon, spilling out over the reeds
And rushes stomped over by a thousand pink herons
Sleeping on one leg, forgetting that underneath their feet lies Atlantis,
Like a declaration of love in a courtship, the marriage contract
Nailed to the Cathedral door, but you had to behold other rivers
V
The Berbice is a conflux of three rivers at Georgetown that
Empties into the arms of wetlands and soft flats surrounded
By tropical forests, a whistle-stop at the end of the world, the outpost
Where Caravaggio never died on the beach and Rembrandt never slept
Is no more than a stream in comparison to what will come,
Intoxicating your teen-age heart with the tenacity of a conquistador
VI
Peering over your shoulder for ambush at every drip of gel,
Every lavish surface and combed unzipped landscape,
Haunted by rivers that flow through your veins like blood
Like sake, or vodka except that you prefer English whisky
Straight, no ice and the Scottish songs of backstreet Mayfair pubs
That you stumble into unbuttoned like a horny sailor on furlough
VII
That’s what happened when you passed under that first bridge
Over the Thames and came face to face with free will,
Its navy-blue shadows invaded your life along with the color gray,
Along with winter, fog, snow and the frontier of your fame
Aren’t you happy? Why do you hold your breath and stare?
This melancholy light will be with you until your days are over,
VIII
The rivers continue to flow subterraneous, subversively
Beneath the surface of bohemian and literate life, erupting
From time to time in great Levesque undulations that fry and dry all,
Sweeping the poker table clean, so like Pushkin’s grandfather Hannibal,
You ruin yourself raising hell, bankrupting years, accumulating
Debts, building citadels to assault Turner, Gainsbourgh, and Reynolds
IX
Raising your moveable canvases to allow the sea breeze of the river’s burnt umber
To summon Homer and Ulysses until you wear yourself out with the mundane
And head for the new world and Warhol, Brooklyn, Babylon,
Studio 54, the Factory and Miles Davis, and the Hudson
This river, which wore America’s colors; red; white, blue and black
New raw acrylic colors, plastic gel, loose canvas and wax
X
Sharing bed and breakfast with the gang at the Chelsea Hotel
Picking up dames and musicians’ grass bemused by
The USA’s penchant for discussions about race and
The color black which you rarely use, deferring to Rothko
To define the holocaust, rather than the Diaspora
Leaving America’s obsession, to Americans and their morning coffee,
XI
Concentrating instead on Turner’s glow, that angel dust of the sublime
Thighs open for the taking like homesteading in Australia
Crossing vast corn fields as wild as the extinct American bison
Those one-ton beasts in the room with the exterminated Indians
Until you steamship home on the Queen Elizabeth returning to
The cool grace of the Thames luminescence in Shakespearian love,
XII
And Thames’ obsession and redemption: the light
Holograph of the effect of greatness upon feeling: the landscape,
Holding forth and holding up the universe of immateriality
That work of art which in its perfection arrives at the sublime
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway, that abstract
Immensity that evokes only omnipotent energy and saving grace.
Famine II
The rains didn’t come in October
The rains didn’t come in April
The rains hadn’t come in four years
When my last goat died
When my last cow fell to its knees
I picked up my children and all I possessed,
A few rags, a plastic bottle, a metal pail
A stove, a plow, the Koran and I left
At every village we grew in members,
From a column of hundreds, then thousands
From any village to a nation of a million souls
We came, walked silent and loose-eyed with hunger
With nothing to drink and only leaves to eat.
I buried my son when he dropped, where he stood
Then a daughter, then another daughter.
I watched seven people sit down and die
I carried my 4th on my back
Then I realized he was dead too so I lifted him
Off and buried him there, on the way from
Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda
Three million people stumbled towards refuge and any river,
Surging around the Horn of Africa like the sea;
The long slow death march across
The three million year old desert, its name
The sigh of a plea for water, Sahel, Sahara
I stood, holding my last suckling enfant Rukiah
A miracle of survival because I could still nourish her,
My bare feet burned into the malignant sand, my sari
No more than a rag with nothing to cover my hair,
My scarf I had used as a shroud for the last burial
The eyes of Rukiah held no reproach and followed
My lips as my prayers fell like, my tears,
Indifferently and silently without sobs or curses
Quietly like mother elephants searching for burial grounds
For a few million Somalis who surrounded me, stomachs rumbling
Followed by a hiccup of pain and Rukiah’s wail,
As people moved on and away walking to nowhere with nothing
I wondered what terrible thing we had done,
To have ended up here, who in his anger Allah was
Punishing, as I watched her eyes roll back in her head
And death take her silently without a whimper
I did not break my stride nor slow my shuffle
But continued stubbornly still carrying her as if alive
Two days later I put her down and tore the hem off my last skirt
And wrapped her in it, lighting a bonfire under her body to cheat
The vultures followed the dying masses and braggingly
Walked besides us like cousins, laughing as I wept that
There was no water to wash her; overhead a Predator Drone
Mixed its hum with the wide winged predators of God
Who saluted the famished hordes and the armies of Exodus
Famine II
The hordes of wrath
Marched straight across the beach to
The rim of the Mediterranean
Peering over its brim at Europe
Masses of the famished from
The horn of Africa wading
Waist deep into the rough sea
Come to part the waters to the continent
And is the white man ready?
For visitors from inner space?
Aliens in blood and color
Climate and religion or so they say,
The poor who make up 98 percent
Of planetary humankind
Would they shoot these feverish bastards?
Fire rubber bullets into the crowd?
Or would it be cruise missiles
From an aircraft carrier combating
This second coming of the Diaspora
Obliterating distance, standing
On each other’s shoulders, to
Drain the sea, leaving only brine
And spangled banners of independence
They consume in all the oxygen
In the H2O ocean which evaporates
Into salt flats strong enough to walk upon
Declaring war by immigration
The brave and the cowardly, young and old
Laborers and farmers, soldiers and police,
Unending gratuitous humanity
And Europe gets its guns
The sea they thought was wide enough
Turned out to be a pond unfit to
Segregate the haves and haves more from
The have-nots and never-will have’s
They scamper up Gibraltar
And overrun Spain, they spy
On France, from Lampedusa
Their armada is stronger than
The need for oil and gas
Petrol rigs turned into public Housing
Empire builders of yore the joke’s on you
The natives have learned their lesson well,
No more glass beads for black gold
Or yellow gold for whisky and venereal disease
The end of exploitation of the colored races
A stone’s throw, they throw stones
Hardly ever missing their mark: England,
France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain
Banging on tin plates for food, moving
As one great mass toward extinction
And Europe gets its glass and aliens to kill
The Arab Spring, the Somali famine, the
Libyan Revolution, the Afghan Taliban
Africans have sent not one grain of rice
To their fellow Africans, the Shame of
South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria, No
They wait for the Humanitarians to arrive
From outer space except that very soon
The humanitarians will be extinct like
The Snow Leopard and Africa will sink
Into the sea like Atlantis never to rise
Never to hold that one moment of true
Freedom, of exhilarating true independence
That of the un-rhetorical ancient gods
Those that supercede Islam and Christianity
Undoing that knot of memory and releasing
The powers of old; salvation and resurrection
In which famine will vanish, earthquake, fire
Locusts will no longer breed in the tainted ozone.
And the hordes will turn back towards the
Mother of humanity, the Diaspora graves will open
And Eden will displace famine
The Gods will walk once more around the rim of
The Mediterranean who will feed them and invent a new
Empire of the Poor of the Earth, ready
To claim their heritage so long deferred,
To the suicides and perish standing.
Earthquake
I
Once upon a time,
Just north of Memphis,
Near the town of New Madrid,
A brave new world ended
With shocks so great, the ground liquefied
And the Mississippi River flowed backwards,
New lakes appeared and dinosaur bones
Blurted forth defying 3 million years of solitude
Vast icebergs in the Arctic moved
Yet it was not the Apocalypse we had imagined,
People were still loved and hated, babies were born,
The sun set between the golden thighs of the
Grand Canyon, which opened and yawned at the sky,
Shaking in a mad Parkinson’s disease dance
The real world shook itself like a dog so empty, it echoed
II
Nothing was still especially those intrepid hearts
Which beat like trapped moths in a glass jar
While whole towns disappeared without a trace,
Prehistoric bacteria emerged from earth’s surface,
Radioactivity flung itself over humankind, and
Animals alike burning the grassy plains the
Sickly yellowish color of serpent venom
Rising from the Rockies as blood red lava,
Ash as profound as a sequel to 9/11
Then came the Tsunami wave vacuuming fields and deserts
And we could only hold fast waling or go under wondering
Who had done what to Mother Nature who coughed
And laughed, her naked buttocks gleaming, straddling
The debris, pissing into the flood as she took back
The planet we had borrowed, and gave us Pandemonium
The Affliction of Troy Davis
Look, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.
—Issiah, 49:16
I
Life, or what is left of it, ends
In Chathan County Penitentiary, Georgia,
On Death Row, strapped to the execution charriot
Behind a glass wall of blank faces,
Still concious of a last meal refused,
Still gagged by the last words uttered
To the mother of the slain white patrolman
“I am not responsible for your son’s death”
As the lethal injection begins to erase
The last protestation of Innocence
Unable to imagine how it would feel
To be truly guilty instead of innocent
More innocent than the free breeze faultering
Through this transparent cubicle surrounding
Impenetrable faces filled with ignorance and contempt
For everything he has ever been or stood for,
His own mother’s cruel words to close his eyes,
“Let this crucifixion be done, this longest day
Be finished, this twenty year supplice be ended
And that night falls, that peace is brought, that rest stays
With the seven recanted witnesses and the one
Who avowed the murder himself”
Despite all this, the machine of injustice grinds on
As thoughtless as the cosmos while the condemned man cries, “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
II
All those enforcers who compell colored boys
(I was not yet 20) to confess under duress
All those southern state prosecuters who
Comply to mendacity and miscarriages of justice,
All that time on the cross on death row in
Torturous humanity, and anxious prayer and fasting;
From March 18, 1991 until today, September 24, 2011
While the world wrings its hands and cries “Shame”
One million petitioners howling for justice, for mercy,
For truth, for humanity, for comprehension, for honor,
Carter, Sessions, Tutu, the Pope, Mandela, Sarkozy,
51 members of the House, 18 senators, 14 nobles excluding
Obama who seems to think silence is statesmanship
Instead of hypocrisy, perverted states rights, and politics
Ignoring gross judicial errors, racism, false witness,
Mistaken identity, recanted testimony, intimidation,
Witness tampering, racial profiling, prejudiced judges,
Corrupt district attorneys, heartless bounds of pardon and parole,
And above all Georgia, the sovereign of the Confederacy,
The megastate of retrovision and racial aberation,
Kowtow by the President of all Americans in the name of
Political correctness and fear of the racist right when
Fearlessness could have been justified in the name of
A Presidential Pardon despite the polls, “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
III
The short, Tragic life of Troy Davis ends,
With this final lethal injection on top of all the other
Lethal injections: invisibility, injustice, solitude
Born in poverty’s prison before he could walk
Handcuffed in the same chains of yesteryear
The same dried blood on the same bent heads,
The same wild stones on the same cracked spines,
The same mothers carrying the same water;
The policeman’s whose son remains unrevenged
The condemned’s who watches the extermination
Of one more black boy in Georgia,
Lying helpless on this table as silent as the strobe lights above,
Who was twenty once, twenty years ago
Who had ambitions and a girlfriend and was full of sap
Who thought he belonged to the greatest nation in the best
Of all possible worlds and who knew the clean, cool, touch of
Law and Order, freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial
Who spent that magical year of Twenty-one and adulthood
That magic threshold of life, of wholeness, and objectivity behind bars
Not only son, but man, not only brother, but husband,
Not only identity but pride are all denied him,
Standing in the dark mildewed corridor of Death’s Row
Surrounded by cut-throat good ol’ Georgia’s boys,
Howling in a wind tunnel of an indifferent world, “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
IV
Female justices of the Supreme Court,
Change the world. Only as judges and mothers
Can you obliterate the pain of a child’s death,
Only those who possess wombs can change the irrevocable wrong
By the State in the case of revocable error.
Come lie down beside an innocent man
And taste the bitter tears of remorse now that
It is too late and you will know as the executed know
What forever really means
Peering from the safety of the grandstand protected
By a glass wall, take care to wash your hands
Throughly after use, wash and wear again and again
Until they sting and seethe with recrimination and remorse
Not because I die, but because you live
It is not for me to tell you who to kill and who not to
But to ask yourself if God’s will is man-made
Just as man’s soul is mortal
The only immortal soul is the universal one
From which each soul arises and
Into which each soul returns to repeat history,
You, you, and you have murdered without cause
An innocent who has not killed,
And your souls will collide with mine in the Universe
And I will recognize you, saying “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
Mao’s Organ
I said I’d never do this,
Write a poem about a sculpture
But when the red-silk bloomed un-uttered
To the surface of steel and bronze
It became the writing on the wall
It filled the hollow of my bones
My chest emptied with strange soliloquies
And even hallucinations, about what?
And it did look like the Devil’s laughter
Polished to the gilded gleam of a burning candle
I fondle every fold like a blind woman pursuing
Each machine-made chrysanthemum
My fingers burn on the still warm metal
And the cool silk of his homeland.