chapter06-1

Going to Memphis

I’m leaving this place,

Quitting this watery catalogue,

Held sweetly on this river by my boat,

Lacquered in black and white and covered with

Designs of swords and cups, wands and pentacles.

My hair trails in the reflected sky while

My men’s oars drag in the pearly wrack.

I weigh a pomegranate on the scale before me,

A bushel of sunflower seeds to the left of me,

A basket of shellfish to the right of me,

A fountain flows in back of me and a palm crowns me;

Nevertheless we do not eat nor drink nor stop for rest.

We are going to Memphis.

I gaze into the saffron mirror of Venus,

The cups to the left of me and the cubes to the right,

The twelve fruited tree shade me and a white pillar crosses me;

The day passes and quivering heat visions

Mingle with the steam of my breath as

I keen to the rhythm of the rowers while

The sun blows on my eyelids,

Where love comes up poppy-red (what joy cultivated) and

My eyes become as unseeing as baked amber,

Set in the deadly cross of a gilded past as

We pass forgotten places and they wave to me from the

Shore.

We pass remembered places and they wave to me from the Shore.

We pass dreadful places and they wave to me from the shore.

We pass nameless places and they wave to me from the shore.

My cry carried by herons unfurls across water:

I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,

I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way.

I’m going to Memphis.

I’m leaving this place,

Cheeks swollen with puffed breaths of desperate life.

Swaddled in silk sails embroidered delicately by infant hands,

I glide from mistake to mistake,

Raising my colors insolently for everyone to see,

For I am the Signifier;

The way is in me.

My convicts need no compass and my sails no wind,

For this river runs deep and this river runs straight.

This river runs wide and this river runs true.

No steel and concrete dam can alter its course;

No explosions of man-made trivia arrest its current.

I hum to myself softly and pluck on a ram’s head.

My eyes keep to his and not to the shore for I need no sign.

The moon rises behind me,

The path opens in front of me,

The mountains stay to the left of me,

The stream remains to the right of me,

IHVH crowns me and Ankh crosses me with a kiss.

Eclipse comes and the orb of the world dissolves in a pentagram.

Comets kiss stars and neighboring universes fiance hotly,

Watching ellipsoids spin and meteorites wed asteroids,

Colliding like a panicked crowd at the fire exit of space as

We pass old friends and they wave to me from the shore.

We pass worn loves and they wave to me from the shore.

We pass my children and they wave to me from the shore.

We pass my lovers and they wave to me from the shore.

My cry carried by sparrow hawks unfurls across waters:

I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,

I’m going to Memphis.

III

I’m leaving this place,

Nostrils exhaling rare incense,

Intoxicating sea gulls into suicide dives against my chest,

I watch luminous crabs make love in the deep.

A felucca, sodden sails big-bellied with sin, hung low from

God knows what heathen voyage makes a figure eight in salute.

I sigh and light my pipe in the modern dawn

And play cards with the Hierophant,

His triple crown reversed, his scepter triply crossed,

And I win which makes him triply cross,

And Anibus sees it from his tower and laughs in his harelip

While I drink the wreath before me and crush the wheel,

Devour the lion to my right and strangle the wolf to my left,

Pick the red rose that crowns me and bloodied become very silly,

Giggling and snickering behind my hand, panting and screaming

Like a wailing wind-played Aeolian harp unstrung,

Battling in my simple-minded way hysteria and cataplexy,

Insanity, scotoma and the Devil,

Mortifying my own flesh and munching icy emeralds

I fish from the side of the boat with my hair

(They melt in my mouth like rock candy);

Exhausted, I turn and slip into the dreamless sleep of beasts and children.

The wings of the Phoenix press against my bankrupt mouth his head

On one breast as we pass the shore of the dead and it heaves sand at us,

We pass the end of the world and it vomits burning pyres,

We pass the other side of truth, and I don’t recognize it,

We pass the wretched of the earth devouring the dogs of the rich.

My cry haunts me in the mute eyes of black eagles:

I’m going to Memphis, I won’t be back this way,

I’m going to Memphis.

I’ve left this place,

Become as liquid and as salty as the water that carries me,

Descending the depths like a sea-diver umbilical-ly attached

To a past I never loved. I see the beginning of the end,

And enter into it with joy,

Plunge into a tunnel, so wide, so long, so deep that

All conversation stops and everyone becomes very serious,

Sucking the rancid breath of black life until

Our pupils focusing not on any light.

A silver temple rises up like lightning whistling in the dark,

Holy metal veiled in lily-roots snorting downwards,

Making caverns for petulant ghosts,

Reflections etched in black and white on its sinuous surface,

Sculpted like lava cooled by the brine of sea winds,

Smooth as a phallus worn by a million hands,

Warm and heavy metal more luxurious than lust,

Raised on a courtyard laid in Byzantine love-amulets,

A boulevard of unleavened and unrepentant and un-baptized souls

Oscillating in the nacreous light that is neither sun nor moon,

Standing in a Time which is neither day nor night,

In a climate which is neither summer nor winter,

In a sky only burnt-out stars could invent: the negative of light

On a plain as level and as flat as fate.

My criminals lift their oars in salute, oozing molten semen from

the Dead Sea (Sweat from the sons of father-less ghosts),

The keys slide like maggots down the hollow sleeve of the Angel,

God crosses me, illuminating my left side,

Blinding the Sphinx on my right side and hallowing Zero,

Crowning me in blinking, glowing ectoblastic neon forever.

I rise to greet this musical cathedral, arching as if to greet a lover,

Nipples hard and heart bursting whispering:

Memphis I’m arrived.

For I am the Signifier.

The way is in me.

And Now is the time.

Come With Me

Come

With

Into my deep dry bower

Filled with saffron, musk, and Gulheina,

And I will

Raise you up and lead you on. I will sing you A Song

In a clear low voice, A voice of Africa and India,

A Voice of the Arapaho Indians,

A voice of Scotland and Wales.

Come

With

Into my garden

Draped with Spanish moss, honeysuckle, and

wisteria,

And I will

Raise you up and lead you on,

And I will tell you A Tale In a whisper,

A tale of Africa and India,

A tale of the Arapaho Indians,

A tale of Scotland and Wales.

Come

With

Into my reflecting pool

Filled with iris, silvered fish, and sapphire pebbles,

And I will

Raise you up and lead you on.

I will dance you

A Dance

Slowly,

A dance of Africa and

India,

A dance of the Arapaho Indians,

A dance of

Scotland and Wales.

Come

With

Into my orchard

Filled with peach, cherry, and blue raisins,

And I will

Raise you up and lead you on.

I will play you

The Calf Skin

Softly,

The gourd of Africa and the

Sitar of India,

The flute of the Arapaho Indians,

And the bagpipes of

Scotland and Wales.

Come

Tremble in my arms;

You will be a bay leaf shaken,

And I will

Raise you up and lead you on,

I will take you in and let you out,

I will leave you come and make you go,

I will let you down and bring you up,

I will follow you and then go back,

I will quit you and then catch up,

You will arrive and you will depart,

You will begin and you will end,

You will fall down, and

I will pick you up and turn you

Round

And

Lead

You

Home.

Bathers

Bathers

In a new and unpolluted sea,

Fresh from vision,

You and I,

New,

Emerging,

Clinking like metal,

Shiny on the sand,

As wave-washed copper pennies

Anchored by beach lizards,

Weighted in shrouds of

Smooth rose pebbles,

Attached to

Slow-rolling flying kites

Separated by a

Gritty breeze

That winds down

The space

Between us,

As irrefutable as the Great Chinese Wall…

Evaporating sea tears

On you,

Sea tears that dry

Leaving small white

Circles of brine

Not like my tears

That remain

Forever

Undried

As I walk back into that

New and unpolluted sea

Fresh from vision.

You and I,

Old,

Converging

In the ooze of

Radiolarian skeletons

On the bottom

Of the Arabian Sea.

If I Long for that Oasis

If I long

For that oasis I call home,

That white disk edged in

Cold bursting neon,

Remember this: My last refuge is you, my love,

Primed for the onrush of my curious

And dense body

That invades your privacy

Like the echo of the pulses of

Crow wings

One second after flight

When the air is still troubled

And its space hasn’t been displaced

By excited titters of dry gas,

While the ghost of expelled breath

Still hovers in the heated zephyr,

A prediction of turbulence to come

If only every four hundred years.

Like the Phoenix

I rise to greet you,

So stubborn, needful, greedy, determined

To devour you with darkness

While you blind me with light

You’ll remember this battle…

Through the dry ice of concentric hells,

As hoary as snowbound Leningrad

You’ll remember this battle…

How exhausted, my love,

Will we be

In the end?

Loving Mathilde

This is the first day,

Of the rest of my life,

Loving Mathilde,

Born Juneteenth Day

The nineteenth of June, 2008

At two-forty-five P.M.,

Seven pounds, eight ounces

Not made of sugar and spice

But the stuff of American

African, Indian and French

Wine country dreams,

Our little cocktail girl

In a global world

Destined to love

More than we ever dreamed.

Our miracle of authenticity

Sapphire eyes wide shut

Surveying her realm

Serene in Perfection

Not even breathless

From her nine month journey

From non-being to true being

Rising fresh from birth waters

With the beauty of the anointed

All new, even surpassing

Newness to invention itself

Beyond mere reincarnation

Into a work of art

Open your lynx eyes

Mathilde, wave to your followers

Ring in an era which begins

With you and your forbearers

How much do you do already know?

You were not born yesterday,

You are a fossil,

Still carrying in your soul

The sublimity of former lives

In which creatures lurk

who Float from age to age

The past and the future

Coagulate in your blood

Rich and prancing with experience

Annotated with ancestors;

War and Peace

Religion and martyrs

Heroes and Loyalists

Rulers and Rebels

You are all yet none

Of the above, Mathilde

Rising like Venus

From the sea shell of the Universe.

Your baby face like

The ocean’s endurable fascination,

Changing each second, imposing

Irresistible contemplation?

Nothing has the power

To hurt you except

For what power

You give fear

And you shall give none,

As long as I live, loving,

Mathilde, on the first day

Of the rest of my life.

—June 19, 2008

Mathilde

Mathilde ran across the sand

With a daisy in her hand,

Stubbed her toe which made her cry

Loud enough to wonder why,

One should never question pain,

But get up and try again,

You will find a lesson there

Hurt is often Beauty’s dare.

—June 20, 2008

Mathilde: History Lesson

A bunch of slave holders,

Yearning to be free to own

A nation of Africans

Deported from their homeland,

Made the American Revolution

Which preserved the economy of unpaid

Labor capitalism and defended slavery

By preventing King George from abolishing

It in the American colonies

Which killed a lot of Englishmen,

So that they could then proceed with

The genocide of the remnants of the

Indian tribes by moving westward,

Conquering the fruited plains which

Belonged to Mexico in order to achieve

Our sacred Anglo-Saxon birthright to freedom.

—June 29, 2008

Mathilde II

Your birthday falls,

On Juneteenth,

The nineteenth of June,

The day in 1865,

That word of freedom,

Reached American slaves.

Their descendants therefore celebrate

The day they call Juneteenth

As Emancipation day

Because love of a country

Begins with attachment

To Memory.

—June 28, 2008

Mathilde III

A dog and a cat and a bat and a rat

Chased a little brown bug that sat

On a trembling leaf on a tree.

“You better not mess with me”

Said the fat brown bug to the bat

“I sting like a bee,

Much bigger and stronger than thee”

“Oh, I see,” said the bat

“You think you are a bee in a tree,

And that you can escape me,

But unlike the dog and the cat and the rat,

I can fly which they can NOT

Which puts you in a spot!

If you try to fly, you will see why”

But the very smart brown bug

Thought the worse that could ensue

Was to fail to fly to the sky

So he squeezed his eyes shut

And wished himself aloof,

And indeed, he did succeed

The little brown bug became

A yellow and black dragonfly

Which left the bat holding

The cat in a sack

And what about that!

—June 21, 2008

One Hundred And Ten Weeks

One hundred and ten weeks since

You burst onto the universe

And already you can pull

On your socks, fasten your shoes,

Take off your overalls and

Remove a cherry pit.

You can make yourself understood

With “no,” “next,” and “she’s not here,”

Know who you are with “me,” “mine”

And “yours” and who “mummy” is

And “Daddy” and “Bobby” and “Toto”

What departure is “bye-bye” with a wave,

What arrival is with a kiss, what hurt is

And even the lack of pain; “no bobo”

Eyes wide open to the world, you can

Navigate a tree, a curbstone, a puddle,

Propelled forward on legs that have

Just learned what vertical motion is.

Wheeling forward to embrace the world,

The leaf of a tree

Studied with the concentration of

A nuclear scientist, the universe is yours,

Delivered unto your churning limbs

Small hands, avid eyes, perfect

Body and brave heart

All the amazing total of

One hundred and ten weeks of

Mathilde’s worldly existence,

And in French.

—June 19 2011

La Chenillere I

You

Celebrate well

In all seasons,

Like one good wine

Summer light,

Low and tender,

Powdered and delicate,

Linden-tree leaves trembling,

I saw

Three wild swans

The other day,

Two white and

One black.

Summer light,

Low and tender,

Floating in silence,

Only low flying

Swallows and

Now and again a

Wild duck or

A swamp gull

Water skiing.

Summer light,

Low and tender,

Quiet, black,

Non-reflecting water,

Fretted with

Silver coins.

We’ve been having

Rainstorms with

Bursts of sunshine.

Summer light,

Low and tender,

Suddenly

The sky darkens like a rash,

Then, as suddenly,

A burst of yellow,

A spotlight

Casting long and navy shadows

On white stone walls.

You

Celebrate well

In all seasons,

Like one good wine.

La Chenillère II

You

Celebrate well

In all seasons,

Like one good wine

But you are best

Now,

In November,

Cracked like Chinese porcelain,

Brittle as blown crystal,

Swept with curling leaves

Scattered like hysterical kisses

That have lost their power to convince,

Covered with naked vines

That have lost the regency of love,

Revealing a permanent paradisiacal embrace

Of cloying tentacles.

You are best

Now,

In November

When bullets riffle and rattle the dawn,

And quail and partridge scream,

Hunted by beasts of both sorts,

Treading the flesh and bone of pine cones underfoot,

When rid of that vulgar summer green blanket

That molds and softens like a woman’s make-up.

Nude, you rest under the rapt and skeletal gaze of winter,

Under the same futile and furious scrutiny

That one day one turns on one’s own life

At the point

Where

It begins

To end.

La Chenillère III

Four little brown boys playing in the sun,

Romping on the wide green lawn sprinkled

With corn flowers, the pond swollen

Under droplets of light, the deep green

Line of Montrichard forest forming a blue haze.

French and English tickle each other,

In phrases and cries, gibberish and shouts,

As strong thin legs rush by hedges,

Circle around oak trees and into the rushes and pines

Oblivious of needles, nettles and poison ivy.

No longer four separate supple bodies

But one interlaced mass of young flesh,

And perhaps a football, I don’t recall,

I remember the red rowboat inscribed Beetle

Lying wet and shiny on a bed of moss.

The swans who think they have the run

Of the pond, sing and whistle love songs

Chirp about their right of way in traffic supple,

But the children pay no heed until

The Black Swan glides by

Regal and male cursing in loud shrieks

For quiet and sex from his females

The rioting bodies not understanding,

Go on playing and squealing oblivious

To the swan’s songs of rutting

Above their romping and shoving

Lies the vault of a perfect summer day

In chateau, country, the Loire, a chorus

Of white limestone in architectural musicality

Chaumont, Ambroise, Chambord, Blois

All have their bloody stories stabbing the

Centuries when peasants and kings

Romped like those four beyond in the sunshine

And still believed in Divine Right

We have work to do but we procrastinate

Our drowsy eyes hardly open after lunch

Pinning for a Negre to do our work

To edit the verses and draw the milk and honey

From the lazy afternoon that never ends

Except to leave the children’s hoops and hollers

That rebound from oak to oak like

Butterflies from flower to flower

How will they remember this taste of France

These American brothers nurtured on

A billion of hamburgers - hold the ketchup

They are so different yet so alike,

these Multi-toned cousins, their working mothers

Sitting in the shade with mint and lemonade

And Chloe murmuring mantras: “A Rose!”

Is a rose is a rose, damn it!

Don’t say that just because you know

The words and can tear off the pedals

To count the hanging participles for Random House

We are not prisoners of Zorro in full steel

Armor ready to do battle with syntax

Chloe aka Morrison of the wicked eye

Rocks me with her editorial lullaby

Along the trimmed grass and sand & gravel paths

Which all lead in stately procession

To the Poet’s Arbor.

La Chenillère IV

In August 1979, my oak trees fell ill.

Like people they ran fevers,

Turned gray, smelled bad, secreted fluids,

Grew ulcers and gangrene on their leaves

Which turned October Red

Like blood and stuck like glue.

The three-hundred-year-old guardians of my

Country house, the unwavering sentinels

Of my life, six, seven hundred strong

Fell one by one, leaving naked lakes

And raped woods and wounded bowers,

Shadeless life and yawning emptiness.

The doctors came and the gardeners,

The tree surgeons and the horticulturists,

They cut and pricked, injected and drained,

They clipped and treated roots, murmured

Incantations and, in the end, they sighed And wrung their hands and sent their bills.

Oak Blight swept through my life

Like a cyclone, uprooting trees,

Emptying stands, changing the landscape,

Mutilating limbs, destroying perfection.

The tree population of my existence left.

Dry curling leaves ate at my heart.

The virus swept through the countryside

Mounting the Cher and descending the Loire.

Black Death felled domain after domain.

The surgeons’ chain saws wailed in mourning

From Blois to Tours, from Chaumont to

Amboise, leaving my house naked,

My lake unshrouded, my life unframed.

My hallowed oaks, which had stood

Alone and majestic

In their own praise

Since Franfois I,

Fell crashing one by one.

In horror I watched the carnage under the

Strobe lights of summer, then winter, then

Summer again; my eyes, by now

Slid off the cancerous

Trunks and desecrated boughs.

A naked carbuncled beggar,

Franfois I stood, a cuckold leprous husband

Crouched in the crossfire of war

While the enemy advanced, masked and goggled,

Invading the woods,

The stands, the pond, the prairie,

Leaving me without a permanent address.

I wept and prayed and cursed

The plague on my own house.

The peasants came and tied

Bouquets of garlic around a dead tree’s waist,

Stuffed human offal into her roots,

Watered it with the urine of pregnant cows,

But my oak trees bled on.

The bucherons arrived and left a burning pyre,

A holocaust of flaming stumps,

Till ashes only remained:

Smoldering and thick with resin and tears

The year I divorced.

Genesis

He brought out

From the secret vault’s sanctuary

Four Books scribed with an

Unknown language using

Strange sumptuous subscriptions,

The characters in the shapes of

All sorts of animals

Representing abridged expressions

Of liturgical language illuminated

In code, cipher and metaphor,

The letters were knotted and

Curved like wheels, or

Plaited and stood like columns

Interwoven like tendrils of incunabula

To protect their secret beginnings

From the curiosity of the

Vulgar and uninitiated

As priests and gurus always do

To enhance their secrets,

Writing in tongues

Obscuring what is simple

With what is necessary

To their livelihood

For God’s sake

Black or white, Hindu

Moslem, Christian, orthodox

Confucian or animalistic,

Every secret held by those men

Who hungrily hold the flame

Warming their chilled and callused

Hands over the fires of sacrificial

Gifts to whatever deity excusing

Whatever abominations necessary

Splendid watchdogs with the friendly

Dialogue of the torturer

On the naked skin of man.

D-Day Requiem

Let famous voices cease

Great Orators be stilled,

Ban the Praise Songs of Children

Listen instead to the silence,

Of white picket fences made of

White crosses stretching along eternity’s beach,

Ordinary men whose voices

Embellish no history book,

Vigorous young men who lost

Their virginity on the sands,

Of Normandy blood warm flesh

Charred against tempered steel,

Mere boys parting the waters

Crawling like crabs onto foreign soil,

Saviors of an idea of Great men

They read about in History 101,

Let famous voices cease

Listen instead to the silence

Of the eternal mother

Whose grief is recorded in no discourse

Small lives that fill only

Spaces between the lines of the chronicles,

So we may listen not to the

Silver sermons of generals,

Nor the rotund praise of Presidents

And thumping snap of silk flags,

Nor the roar of tricolored vapor

From polished flying jets,

But the silence of the picket fences

And the stutter of Atlantic seagulls,

The sighs of widows and orphans

Casting melodies on the lengthening shadows,

Of identical white crosses strewn across

The last beach of the last just war.

Any Day Now

Any day now life will

Turn its back and walk away,

Show its fangs and munch

On marinated cranium

Unable to hold a 495 page

Book within its circumference

Life which once seemed full

Of sparkling, moving matter,

Of will and love and stress,

Affections and detestations,

Passions and lordly proclamations

And discriminating exclusions is gone.

Now only the harsh corn skulks

Of promised disease and dementia

And all inclusive Alzheimer’s

Burning into brain matter

Once so arrogant and neurotically connected

Survive, “Oh, I’d commit suicide,” you said.

Well, here are my wrists darling

All I see are candy-colored pills of

Every shape and prescription staving off the ravages

Of total annihilation: of that cactus plant

Life which holds only one

Drop of water and one blossom.

Blood Sacrifice

On a peculiar night

A sacred image

Is carried by black eunuchs

On a litter and is wept over,

With regular laments which

Fall in cadences. Then satisfied,

By these ceremonies of fake tears,

A lamp is brought in next,

The shaman oils the throats

Of all those who are weeping

And once they are anointed,

The Priest murmurs to them

In his prayer whisper

“Do not fear initiates

God has been saved

For us, there will be salvation”

“You bury one idol,” he thinks,

“You weep for one idol

One idol you remove from

The Tomb…”

Both sexes are agreeable

To that holiness inherent

In the succession of the

Two sexes that the intermediate

One is conserved…

It is no longer male and

Yet neither is it female

Delighting God, the Mother

Who procures for herself

The delicate razors used

By the beardless masters

Happiest amongst men

Having seen and heard

The sweetest mysteries of

Blood…

Harrar

And out of Omega we came.

Out of the womb of the world we came,

All pleasure in feast and love forgotten,

All rancor in feud and war forgotten,

All joy in birth and circumcision forgotten.

We came, Blackbodies: the negative of light,

The perfect absorber of radiant energy.

Our black bodies, the only merchandise that carries itself,

A column of jet quickening,

Gyrating in one celestial tribal dance,

Rolling and spreading like a giant blastula thickening,

Spinning itself into the fireball of a new planet.

Out of Omega, rending the cosmos

In a season of stars, we came,

Groaning across deserts and beyond the pyramids of Kush,

A lunar landscape of mountains and black sand,

Of Basalt and Obsidian, biotite and barium,

Rock and mineral, bone black and brimstone,

From secret undergrounds, pebbled with diamonds and gold scum

Into the Hell of ghostly White we came.

In eclipsed sun we came: the negation of time.

Our women a nation of Banshee

Conned from every bankrupt and ravished Kingdom:

Zeila & Somaliland, Galla & Abyssinia, Tigre & Shoa.

Wading waist-deep across rivers:

Niger & Nile, Orange & Congo, Cubango & Kasai.

Strung out in caravans, we came, a stunned string of

Black pearls like a hundred-year centipede: one thousand,

One thousand thousand, one million, three, six, nine million, thirty million,

Sprawling over the badlands, carrying death in every heart

Across frozen wastes: the negative of earth

Torn like belladonna lilies from their roots, we came

On one savage wail, whirling soundlessness,

Lashing the hot sand of Ogaden,

The red flag of slavery blotting out sky, hope, and memory

Granite phalli marking graves strewn backwards,

Fingers clutching a chilled sun in cyclone

While murder moved …

Move murder move!

Sacred vultures pick flesh skeleton-white as

The Gods sit mute and horrified on their

Polished haunches, silent and powerless while we labor under

An armor of glinting sweat, through petrified forests,

Our mouths stuffed with pebbles so that no cry escapes,

Our bloodied lips, beaten back at every step by clouds

Of insects that cling to flesh like leeches in love,

Undisturbed by our shackled hands and bent necks that sway

In malignancy, metal, oiled with tears, grates silently: the song-less Mass

Its distant verse a children’s chant, muffled in the

Barren dust that shifts and bursts underfoot

As light as charcoal, as deep as genesis,

Move murder, more!

Orphans sway like clinging monkeys, suckled at wet nurses’ breasts,

Their mothers drowned in their own afterbirths.

Dazed tribes of virgins trample hot rock,

Believing this to be their only travail.

Stupefied magicians and priests, Banged and weighted down with fetishes,

Stumble blindfolded, chained one to the other in perfidy.

Empty mouths rail empty supplications.

Why isn’t Belshazzer here?

But then we have no writing and no walls …

Our outraged Gods wheeze and groan, carried on slippery ebony shoulders

Their godheads still roseate in the gathering dusk.

Magic is vanquished. No more will the Tribes

Prostrate themselves before Amon, Save, Seto, and Whoot, Legba and Ogun.

No longer will the Nation swallow the burning sperm of warlords

For they have allowed us and the Gods to fall into this abomination.

The multi-colored powders of the Rites

Have blended into that which is all colors: Black.

Boulders of our grief block our way like the

Palm of Shango, and the weight of Blackness undoes us all …

In the brazen glare of Harrar’s beach,

One collective scream rams the sullen sea,

Vibrating the python of the continent

As tremors of our earthquake

Ripple back towards Africa and, in that last moment,

With sea and slavery before us,

The Race, resplendent unto itself, dissolves and

All biographies become One.

Death Sentence I

Every life

Comes with

A death sentence

Just as every soul

Contains a precise

Number of breaths

Allocated to one’s

Time on earth.

Kisses, caresses, orgasms

Imprinted on each of us

Are also rationed By Fate.

Isn’t it more logical

That life was

Created whole?

That after X

Number of encounters,

The world As we know it,

Ends?

Children and savage

Animals know this

And celebrate it

With games And wars that all

Lead to homicide,

Until taught

Better by their

Keepers and Elders

Civilizing them into

The belief of some

Heaven or hell

Belonging to

The Dark Ages

And the werewolf

Forests of Liebestod.

Reincarnation

But only he is initiated,

For those who have no faith

Who don’t take part in

The sacred rites,

There is no ultimate destiny

Once he is dead, he sleeps

In the Dormitory of Gloom

And Purgatory forever.

Inhaling

There is a Hindu saying

That one is born with

A certain number of breaths

And when they are finished

The person dies.

But nothing in the proverb

Explains the difference between

Racing through life breathless

And loitering through it

Waiting to exhale.

Gnostic Writings First Century AD

I am the first and the last,

I am the wife and the virgin,

I am the mother and the daughter,

I am she whose wedding is uncelebrated

And I have not taken a husband,

For I am knowledge and ignorance,

I am shame and boldness,

I am shameless and I am ashamed

I am strength and I am fear

I am war and peace.

Elegy

Shirley of Pinellas Park

Was called to our Lord

On February 6, 2008

From the Woodside Hospice,

In Pinellas Park, Florida,

After twenty-five years

Of service

In the Pinellas Park

High School system,

Survived by her sister and her brother

Her four children

Her twelve grandchildren

Her five great-grandchildren

But preceded in death

By one brother

Two infant sons

One granddaughter

And a great grandchild.

Where was I?

—June 29, 2008

Virum

How many times did I fail to kiss your mouth?

How many times did I miss inhaling your neck?

How many times didn’t I press my lips on your palm?

When I should have.

Thousands of seconds lost in the void

Devoured, gobbled up, consumed within time’s

Spectrum, which eats time, is attached to time

Vomits time until only solitude is left.

My soul racing in rivulets like rain on skin,

Dark hair curled on broad pectorals now defunct

Reduced to chagrin and stone, my sejour bereft,

My tongue catching drops of your stolen essence

While you were alive and mine, feasting

On proliferate hours and superfluous seconds,

When I should have

VIRUM VOLITARE PER ORA.

The Seal

Stranger when you place your delicate hands on me, write your dreams on my left side, undo my hair suddenly and for no good reason, stranger, when you place your mouth hot as Alexandrian sand that cools my parched throat like well-water, place your mouth on my mouths, one and then the other, until I taste myself, stranger, when you weight my flesh desperately, burden it politely, mold it and kneed it and penetrate it asking and giving no quarter, stranger when you take from me that sound primordial which in silence quits me with the stealth of a rain-forest beast fleeing, stranger, when with a finger I trace your lips, that debauched mouth (voluptuary) (you) (egoist) with that cynical left side and that right side dissolved in sensibility Stranger when I tongue your breast as hard and as flat as outlaw destination, stranger, when your nostrils narrow, your cries escape cries I extract with feral tenderness you! your arrogant silences silenced, stranger, when I scan your face, beauty-ravaged-male-body the Rector rectified, done in under mine, reversed when that hour strikes, I think ah, well: well-loved stranger, when will we be friends?

Le Lit

Sullen blizzard of white linen

Lying rumpled

Under the morning sun,

Last night’s pressed flesh

Still glowing like the flickering shadows

Of a silent movie,

Contours still raging like burnt-out onion skin

Dry and flaking with

Tiny ridges where a thousand drummed dreams

Swim like microbes.

Pale, rider-less white,

Turning as the sun turns

Into a melancholy monument,

Spent sheets with the pillows on the floor,

Whistling like Memnon at dawn,

Blue-veined as Carrara marble,

Frozen into Alexandrine History,

A tombstone fashioned by some

Second-rate sculptor

To support his family of ten.

Summits like a crumpled Sphinx

Take on a life of their own.

Mesas and mountains rise and fall.

Lake bottoms and craters breathe and sigh

Strangled and tortured in the

Tangled limbs of a forlorn and

More than slightly ridiculous lagoon,

A neglected memorial from the Great War,

Expensively made only to be disfigured by

Disrespectful children.

I ache to soothe those troubled peaks of lust,

To calm the kind contusions of the night,

At least to lay a wreath on you

And sit silently

In my cripple’s chair,

Relieved to be alive but not happy,

Straining to read

The half-effaced and fading legend

In Roman letters …

HERE LIED.

Love Can Die

Love can die.

I never knew that,

I never knew that

Until

Now.

Sitting across the table from you,

My heart,

A hard green apple

Swaying in the breeze

Of petitions and denunciations

Without falling;

My heart

A steel ball bearing

Gliding smoothly round

The clogs and pistons of

Disillusionment.

Love can die.

I never knew that,

I never knew that

Until

Now,

Sitting across the table from you.

My eyes,

Two raisins

Dried beyond relief,

Beyond any juice,

That lovely wine-love, dark and pungent,

That still might spill,

Slipping down my throat like

Fingers sneaking around my breast,

A leaping heart,

Stunned into silence.

Love can die.

I never knew that,

I never knew that

Until

Now

Sitting across the table from you.

My lips

That once took yours on mine like breath,

Stacked like a deck of cards

The fool strangled,

My clenched teeth, black coals,

My tongue, a steel oven raging

To tell you to Stop,

To Stop,

To Stop

Before I have to tell you myself that

Love can die.

I never knew that,

I never knew that.

I’ve Traveled

I’ve traveled

Across the dewy small of your back,

Down the ridge of backbone like a lonely skier,

Soothed steely flanks,

Held on to your skin,

Kissed damp hair blinding me,

Frail childlike hair, now darkened,

But you were so blond

When we were young.

We’ve traveled,

Left many a mauve flower

Wizened on blue sheets;

Left many a moan

Echoing down dark hallways:

Night sounds that crept past

The nursery where we slept

The clutched and rapturous

Sleep of children.

Together we’ve traveled,

Fingers clasped in that death grip

Of sibling love,

Beyond the Pale,

Beyond the pale

Poppy you press again and again

Into the perfume of a wearied heart

That gleams and creaks

This dusty afternoon.

Beside me, you’ve traveled,

Followed me down steep, slippery stairways

Into the entrails of that reprobate mansion

Demolished, abandoned, and condemned by all,

Thus the most perfect and intact of all places:

The barred light of your cell where

I brush the cobwebs from your eyes,

Press my hand on secret parts,

Rest my head on your breast shuddering:

Brother, I’ve loved you.

The Albino

The absence of color,

Is that the answer

To a moral question?

White African,

Walking negative,

Are you

Magic?

An ancestor called back

To prove the soul survives?

White African,

Walking negative,

Are you

Holy?

The sacred circle of the

Tantra?

White African,

Walking negative,

Are you

Proof?

Of the exception

Which proves the rule

Like the Hermaphrodite?

If color exists then

The absence of color must exist

As well

As a single face becomes dual

In a mirror,

As a single body becomes dual

In a shadow,

As a single thought becomes

Past and present

In the mind’s eye,

As the only difference between

The seen and the unseen is

Love,

I am as male as

I am female; I am as white as I am black.

There is no difference

Between She and He,

Between You and Me.

You are as female as you are male;

You are as black as you are white.

Together we are

One,

Yet together

We are not

One,

But as love knows,

Only love knows

Our subtle differences.

Let there be

No doubt

About this.

The absence of color

Is that the answer

To a moral question?

The Duchesse of Alba

Mariane Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa

Victoria Eugenia Fitz-James Stuart de Silva,

Twenty times Grandee of Spain,

Five times dutchess and the Dutchess of Alba,

Eighteen times Marquis, twenty times Countess,

Once Baroness and once viscountess,

Once princess descendent from Mary Stewart,

Once Empress, descendent of Eugenia de Montigo,

III

Her ancestor the last queen of France and

Goya’s mistress, the model for his masterpiece

The Nude Maja, one of the 247 masterpieces

In her possession which include

Botticelli, Titian, Rubens, Velazquez

Fra Angelico, Bellini, Andrea del Sarto

Ribera, Canova sculptures, Greek statuary

The ship log of Columbus’ first voyage,

Forty thousand books and twenty thousand

Hectares of Spanish territory, so that

She can cross Spain from one end to the other

Without setting foot in property other than her own

Which makes her the premier landowner of Spain

A Hidalgo rebel, multi-racial and

Cousin to the King with a strain of African blood

Derived from the Portuguese royal family,

VII

Face immobilized by Botox

Thick lips paralized in permanent Congolese,

Two black raisins for eyes lost between

The cheeks of two fesses of wrinkle-less pocked flesh

VIII

White kinky hair both halo and crown

That Anthraconite gaze full like trash baskets

Of tyranny, war, Inquisition and oppression,

Impossible to lift upwards

An avalanche of cross dressing, chromosones and DNA

Limpid swinestones peering sphinx-like through centuries,

A geneological nightmare of love, piracy and property

Red wax sealed marriage contracts volumes long

Annexing and redrawing boundaries and feifs, titles and deeds

Until only the skeleton of marriage remained

Mortgages with bills of sales, notorical cordials and codas

Titles and preemptions, a paper loss trail of debt and inheritance.

I once encountered “la Cugatana” and sketched

That face which resembled the white Bolognese lapdog in

Goya’s original portrait, a reminder of the

New World slavery, that Christopher Columbus gave the world.

XII

Twice widowed, a stable of lovers worthy of her rank

Ali Khan, Orson Welles, Prince Colonna, Cocteau

Dali, Pepe Luis Vazquez, Ernest Hemingway,

Raiding the thrones of notoriety for its princes

XIII

As if fatigued by her own pedigrees at 85,

The duchesse decides to marry a commoner for love,

Ordinary, anonymous, a nobody, devoid of power, fame or fortune,

Her aging and decrepit six children demand that

XIV

The dutchesse divide her 3 billion dollar fortune amongst them,

And exclude her unroyal husband from her will,

Having lived eight decades with and without love, she chooses love,

Her spouse happy to forever remain Frankenstein’s Bridegroom.

Wednesdays in Mississippi

My imagination honors you

Never having met you

Princess of the century.

In your wide-brimmed violet hat

Clara Bow lips, dark glasses

Gazing fondly at your Godson.

As he raises his right hand

At his swearing in on January 8th

During rough Washington winds.

Which whip the tickertape of this historic

Moment you helped make happen

A heavy burden for such slender shoulders.

No happen stance for you who have

Watched them all from Eleanor’s husband

To Bessie’s, Hilary’s and now Michelle’s.

The entire panorama of civil rights

The UN declaration of human rights

Equal employment, feminism and the pill.

Brown vs. the Board of Education

Martin’s March on Washington

The National Council of Negro Women.

And through it all every Wednesday

You mixed your Callaloo

Of white women and black women.

And their common cause in

Your Mississippi living room

Those sunny afternoons when they

Held each other’s hands and listened

To each other’s claim to independence

Adulthood, contraception and the vote

I will come to your Wednesday soirees

As soon as you invite me, your glance

Bright and incredibly astute

Hail to three everlasting heroes

The chestnut eyed princess who died

Yesterday at the magnificent age of 98

Pity the Queen so young!

I wake my little granddaughter

And look into her gray eyes

And tell her of this lady’s crossings,

The classrooms and the lecture halls

The political elections and the offices

The courtrooms and Halls of Justice

The caucus rooms, the Halls of Fame

The marches and the workers’ strikes

The president’s cabinet meetings

And the White House dining room

The forums and the United Nations

The conventions and the Press Conferences

The World Organization and for years

Her beloved NAACP

But always that Mississippi parlor

Sisters old and young, North and South

Black and white, rich and poor,

Girls, wives, widows, divorces,

Your endowed to fight on, the

Grand bow on your rakish

Broad beamed hat bobbing

Like a purple flag at half mast

The princess is no more here

On earth and as in a dream

I hear a viol and a gospel chorus

Singing God Bless America

There is a gust of wind,

Through the Aspens; I shed a tear

Silent in awe and reverence

Joining the throngs that commemorate

The water nymph of excruciating

Dignity that has left the world

Poorer, bleaker, for her absence

Her soft voice shimmering by day

Like the Capital’s pond at inauguration

The cold doesn’t penetrate the

Warmth of accomplishment

The winds subside meekly as

The president speaks slowly

Who has not dreamed of this day?

But Dorothy made this day

The rafters grow dimly

white I don’t need a submissive soul

To have lived deeply and wise

No one’s longing will capture me

I remember Marion’s singing

And Martin’s speechifying

Filling every space, how bright

How unsheltered it was then

The beating of your heart was louder

I dream that souls like yours

Are immortal and remain in this life

Too bad, snow maiden that in April

Your amazing body melted like snow

And now lies under its marble dome

In state as befits a stateswoman

You see everything, you remember all

Preserved in your enfolding angelic wings

For a hundred years from now

I bid you farewell, heroine,

Miracle worker fallen at my feet

Coming out of Selma’s marching

Prisoners, hostages, strikers for freedom

An icon, a mystery, a myth

Like the first mother Earth

My heart will never forge

This one, the one who gave her life

Up to a worshipped cause

But her courage

She takes with her to grave

If I can’t summon you will praise

Nor bring you back with tears

I’ll listen to the sparrows mourning

Revive my soul to heights

For the Mississippi women who

Still exist and carry on with

The sweet curl of lit flame, the battle,

Preserving your image and righteous deeds

Through dusty lashes a long slow gaze

Towards the history that you made

Smiling at the ironies of age which

Allowed you to witness that cold day

Where together you and I were blessed

With days of love and fame

And the wild wail of faith,

For there is no one on earth

More fearless than we are

Marching past all columns

In the familiar comprehensible world

Born neither too early nor

Too late, but having lived unique,

Beyond the History of it all.

For Dorothy Height, April 20, 2010