MY MILLION FATHERS, STILL HERE PAST

Hallelujah for grizzled lip, snuff chew, bended slow walk,

and shit talkin’. Praise fatback, pork gravy, orange butter,

Alaga syrup, grits, and egg sammiches on Wonder Bread

slathered with Hellman’s, mashed ’tween sheets of wax

paper. You hoard that food like money. You are three-day

checker games, pomade slick back, deep brown drink

sucked through holes where teeth once was. You’re that

can’t-shake lyric, that last bar stool before the back door.

All glory to the church deacons, bodies afloat in pressed

serge, nappy knobs of gray hair greased flat, close to conk,

cracked tenors teetering and testifying. Bless you postmen

and whip cloth shoeshiners, foremen with burning backs,

porters bowing deep. I hear swear-scowling and gold-tooth

giggling over games of bid whist and craps, then Sunday’s

Lucky Struck voices playing call-and-response with

the Good Book’s siren song. In the midst of some hymn,

my wilting fathers, I see you young again, you spitshined

and polished, folded at the hips on a sluggish Greyhound,

or colored in the colored car of a silver train chugging past

Pine Bluff, Aliceville, Minneola, Greenwood, Muscle Shoals,

headed north where factories pumped precise gospel

and begged you inside their open mouths. You’re the reason

the Saturday moon wouldn’t fall. You mail-order zoot suit

wide wing felt hats to dip low over one eye, pimp walkin’,

taps hammered into heels, kickin’ up hot foot to get down

one time, slow drag blues threading bone and hip bump

when the jukebox teases. All praise to the eagle what flew

on Friday and the Lincoln Mark, the Riviera, the Deuce

and a Quarter, the always too much car for what you were.

You were lucky number, the dream book, the steaming spoon

of black-eyes on day one of every year. Here is to your mojo,

your magic real, roots and conjures and long-dead plants

in cotton pouches. Deftly misled by tiny religions, you spat

on the broom that brushed your foot, stayed left of light poles.

Griots of sloped porch and city walk, you, my million fathers,

still here past chalk outlines, dirty needles, and prison cots,

still here past ass whuppings, tree hangings, and many calls

to war, past J.B. stupor, absent children, and drive-bys.

You survive, scarred and hobbling, choking back dawn ache,

high pressure, dimming and lying eyes, joints that smell thunder.

Here’s to the secret of your rotting molars, the tender bump

on your balls, your misaligned back, wild corn on that baby

toe, the many rebellions of your black, tired bodies. I watch

you cluck the hard history of lust past your gums, squeeze

rheumy eyes shut to conjure the dream outline of a woman.

I am a woman.

I will rub your weary head,

dance close to you,

shuck you silver peas for dinner.

He was Otis, my father.

But you are Willie Earl and James and Ernest and Jimmy Lee.

All of you, frail charmers, gentle Delta, bodies curled against

the time gone, the time coming. I grieve you tottering toward

death, I celebrate you clinging to life. Open bony dark-veined

arms and receive me, a woman in the shape of your daughter,

who is taking on your last days as her very blood, learning

your whispered language too late to stop your dying,

but not too late

to tell

this story.