Black Boy, O Black Boy,
is the port worth the cruise?
—MELVIN B. TOLSON, Harlem Gallery
Ever since they’d left the Tennessee ridge
with nothing to boast of
but good looks and a mandolin,
the two Negroes leaning
on the rail of a riverboat
were inseparable: Lem plucked
to Thomas’ silver falsetto.
But the night was hot and they were drunk.
They spat where the wheel
churned mud and moonlight,
they called to the tarantulas
down among the bananas
to come out and dance.
You’re so fine and mighty; let’s see
what you can do, said Thomas, pointing
to a tree-capped island.
Lem stripped, spoke easy: Them’s chestnuts,
I believe. Dove
quick as a gasp. Thomas, dry
on deck, saw the green crown shake
as the island slipped
under, dissolved
in the thickening stream.
At his feet
a stinking circle of rags,
the half-shell mandolin.
Where the wheel turned the water
gently shirred.
Two strings, one pierced cry.
So many ways to imitate
The ringing in his ears.
He lay on the bunk, mandolin
In his arms. Two strings
For each note and seventeen
Frets; ridged sound
Humming beneath calloused
Fingertips.
There was a needle
In his head but nothing
Fit through it. Sound quivered
Like a rope stretched clear
To land, tensed and brimming,
A man gurgling air.
Two greased strings
For each pierced lobe:
So is the past forgiven.
Heading North, straw hat
cocked on the back of his head,
tight curls gleaming
with brilliantine, he didn’t stop
until the nights of chaw
and river-bright
had retreated, somehow
into another’s life. He landed
in Akron, Ohio
1921,
on the dingy beach
of a man-made lake.
Since what he’d been through
he was always jiving, gold hoop
from the right ear jiggling
and a glass stud, bright blue
in his left. The young ladies
saying He sure plays
that tater bug
like the devil!
sighing their sighs
and dimpling.
In the city, under the saw-toothed leaves of an oak
overlooking the tracks, he sits out
the last minutes before dawn, lucky
to sleep third shift. Years before
he was anything, he lay on
so many kinds of grass, under stars,
the moon’s bald eye opposing.
He used to sleep like a glass of water
held up in the hand of a very young girl.
Then he learned he wasn’t perfect, that
no one was perfect. So he made his way
North under the bland roof of a tent
too small for even his lean body.
The mattress ticking he shares in the work barracks
is brown and smells
from the sweat of two other men.
One of them chews snuff:
he’s never met either.
To him, work is a narrow grief
and the music afterwards
is like a woman
reaching into his chest
to spread it around. When he sings
he closes his eyes.
He never knows when she’ll be coming
but when she leaves, he always
tips his hat.
1.
Fine evening may I have
the pleasure . . .
up and down the block
waiting—for what? A
magnolia breeze, someone
to trot out the stars?
But she won’t set a foot
in his turtledove Nash,
it wasn’t proper.
Her pleated skirt fans
softly, a circlet of arrows.
King of the Crawfish
in his yellow scarf,
mandolin belly pressed tight
to his hounds-tooth vest—
his wrist flicks for the pleats
all in a row, sighing . . .
2.
. . . so he wraps the yellow silk
still warm from his throat
around her shoulders. (He made
good money; he could buy another.)
A gnat flies
in his eye and she thinks
he’s crying.
Then the parlor festooned
like a ship and Thomas
twirling his hat in his hands
wondering how did I get here.
China pugs guarding a fringed settee
where a father, half-Cherokee,
smokes and frowns.
I’ll give her a good life—
what was he doing,
selling all for a song?
His heart fluttering shut
then slowly opening.
The man inside the mandolin
plays a new tune
every night, sailing
past the bedroom window:
Take a gourd and string it
Take a banana and peel it
Buy a baby blue Nash
And wheel and deal it
Now he’s raised a mast
and tied himself to it
with rags, drunker
than a robin on the wing:
Count your kisses
Sweet as honey
Count your boss’
Dirty money
The bed’s oak
and clumsy, pitching
with its crew,
a man and a wife—
Now he’s dancing, moving
only his feet. No way
to shut him up but
roll over, scattering
ruffles and silk,
stiff with a dog’s breath
among lilies
and ripening skin:
Love on a raft
By the light o’ the moon
And the bandit gaze
Of the old raccoon.
Count it anyway he wants—
by the waiting room clock,
by a lengthening hangnail,
by his buttons, the cigars crackling
in cellophane—
no explosion. No latch clangs
home. Perfect bystander, high
and dry with a scream caught
in his throat, he looks down
the row of faces coddled
in anxious pride. Wretched
little difference, he thinks,
between enduring pain and
waiting for pain
to work on others.
The doors fly apart—no,
he wouldn’t run away!
It’s a girl, he can tell
by that smirk, that strut of a mountebank!
But he doesn’t feel a thing.
Weak with rage,
Thomas deals the cigars,
spits out the bitter tip in tears.
He lets her pick the color.
She saunters along the gleaming fenders
trying to guess his mind.
The flower
dangled, blue flame
above his head.
He had stumbled into the woods
and found this silent
forgiveness.
How they’d all talk!
Punkin and Babe,
Willemma tsk-tsking in her
sinking cabin,
a child’s forest,
moss and threads
gone wild with hope
the boys down by the creek
grown now, straddling
the rail at the General Store . . .
Lem smiled from a tree
and nodded when Thomas told him
he was a few years early.
“We’ll run away together,”
was all Lem said.
She bends over,
admiring her reflection
in the headlamp casing of a Peerless.
On an ordinary day
he would have plucked this
blue trumpet of Heaven
and rushed it home to water.
“Nigger Red,”
she drawls, moving on.
“Catching a woman,” Lem used
to say, “is like rubbing
two pieces of silk together.
Done right, the sheen jags
and the grit shines through.”
A sky blue Chandler!
She pauses, feeling his gaze.
Every male on the Ridge
old enough to whistle
was either in the woods
or under a porch.
He could hear the dogs
rippling up the hill.
Eight miles outside Murfreesboro
the burn of stripped rubber,
soft mud of a ditch.
A carload of white men
halloo past them on Route 231.
“You and your South!” she shouts
above the radiator hiss.
“Don’t tell me this ain’t what
you were hoping for.”
The air was being torn
into hopeless pieces.
Only this flower hovering
above his head
couldn’t hear the screaming.
That is why the petals had grown
so final.
The zeppelin factory
needed workers, all right—
but, standing in the cage
of the whale’s belly, sparks
flying off the joints
and noise thundering,
Thomas wanted to sit
right down and cry.
That spring the third
largest airship was dubbed
the biggest joke
in town, though they all
turned out for the launch.
Wind caught,
“The Akron” floated
out of control,
three men in tow—
one dropped
to safety, one
hung on but the third,
muscles and adrenalin
failing, fell
clawing
six hundred feet.
Thomas at night
in the vacant lot:
Here I am, intact
and faint-hearted.
Thomas hiding
his heart with his hat
at the football game, eyeing
the Goodyear blimp overhead:
Big boy I know
you’re in there.
He avoided the empty millyards,
the households towering
next to the curb. It was dark
where he walked, although above him
the traffic was hissing.
He poked a trail in the mud
with his tin-capped stick.
If he had a son this time
he would teach him how to step
between his family and the police,
the mob bellowing
as a kettle of communal soup
spilled over a gray bank of clothes. . . .
The pavement wobbled, loosened by rain.
He liked it down here
where the luck of the mighty
had tumbled,
black suit and collarbone.
He could smell the worms stirring in their holes.
He could watch the white sheet settle
while all across the North Hill Viaduct
tires slithered to a halt.
On the radio a canary bewailed her luck
while the county outside was kicking with rain.
The kids bickered in the back seat;
the wife gasped whenever lightning struck
where it damn well pleased. Friday night,
and he never sang better. The fish
would be flashing like beautiful sequined cigars.
This time he’d fixed the bait himself,
cornmeal and a little sugar water
stirred to a ball on the stove,
pinched off for the scavenger carp.
So why did the car stall? And leap
backwards every time he turned the key?
Was Gabriel a paper man, a horn player
who could follow only the notes on the score?
Or was this sheriff the culprit,
pressing his badge to the window to say
You’re lucky—a tree fell on the road ahead
just a few minutes ago.
Turned around, the car started
meek as a lamb. No one spoke
but that old trickster on the radio,
Kingfish addressing the Mystic Knights of the Sea.
He gave up fine cordials and
his hounds-tooth vest.
He became a sweet tenor
in the gospel choir.
Canary, usurper
of his wife’s affections.
Girl girl
girl girl.
In the parlor, with streamers,
a bug on a nail.
The canary courting its effigy.
The girls fragrant in their beds.
DEFINITION IN THE FACE OF UNNAMED FURY
That dragonfly, bloated, pinned
to the wall, its gossamer wings in tatters
(yellow silk, actually, faded in rivulets)—
what is it? A pendulum
with time on its hands, a frozen
teardrop, a winter melon
with a white, sweet flesh?
Go on—ask the canary.
Ask that sun-bleached delicacy
in its house of sticks
and it will answer Pelican’s bill.
What else did you expect?
“How long has it been . . .?”
Too long. Each note slips
into querulous rebuke, fingerpads
scored with pain, shallow ditches
to rut in like a runaway slave
with a barking heart. Days afterwards
blisters to hide from the children.
Hanging by a thread. Some day,
he threatens, I’ll just
let go.
Too frail for combat, he stands
before an interrupted wing,
playing with an idea, nothing serious.
Afternoons, the hall gaped with aluminum
glaring, flying toward the sun; now
though, first thing in the morning, there is only
gray sheen and chatter
from the robust women around him
and the bolt waiting for his riveter’s
five second blast.
The night before in the dark
of the peanut gallery, he listened to blouses shifting
and sniffed magnolias, white
tongues of remorse
sinking into the earth. Then
the newsreel leapt forward
into war.
Why frail? Why not simply
family man? Why wings, when
women with fingers no smaller than his
dabble in the gnarled intelligence of an engine?
And if he gave just a four second blast,
or three? Reflection is such
a bloodless light.
After lunch, they would bathe in fire.
This far south such crippling
Radiance. People surge
From their homes onto the streets, certain
This is the end,
For it is 1943
And they are tired.
Thomas walks out of the movie house
And forgets where he is.
He is drowning and
The darkness above him
Spits and churns.
What shines is a thought
Which has lost its way. Helpless
It hangs and shivers
Like a veil. So much
For despair.
Thomas, go home.
That shy angle of his daughter’s head—
where did they all learn it?
And her soldier at tender attention,
waiting for the beloved to slide out
beneath the veil. Thomas knew
what he’d find there—a mocking smile, valiant
like that on the smooth face of the young sergeant
drilled neatly through the first minute of battle.
Women called it offering up a kiss.
He watched the bridegroom swallow.
For the first time Thomas felt like
calling him Son.
Green sludge of a riverbank,
swirled and blotched,
as if a tree above him were shuffling
cards.
Who would have thought
the binding of a “Standard Work
of Reference in the Arts,
Science, History, Discovery
and Invention” could bring back
slow afternoons with a line and bent nail
here, his wingtips balanced
on a scuffed linoleum square
at the basement rummage sale
of the A.M.E. Zion Church?
He opens Motherwell-Orion and finds
orchids on the frontispiece
overlain with tissue,
fever-specked and drooping
their inflamed penises.
Werner’s Encyclopedia,
Akron, Ohio, 1909:
Complete in Twenty-Five Volumes
minus one—
for five bucks
no zebras, no Virginia,
no wars.
They called us
the tater bug twins.
We could take a tune
and chew it up, fling
it to the moon
for the crows to eat.
At night he saw him,
naked and swollen
under the backyard tree.
No reason, he replied
when asked why he’d done
it. Thomas woke up
minutes later, thinking
What I need is a drink.
Sunday mornings
fried fish and hominy steaming
from the plates like an oracle.
The canary sang more furious
than ever, but he heard
the whisper: I ain’t dead.
I just gave you my life.
Swing low so I
can step inside—
a humming ship of voices
big with all
the wrongs done
done them.
No sound this generous
could fail:
ride joy until
it cracks like an egg,
make sorrow
seethe and whisper.
From a fortress
of animal misery
soars the chill voice
of the tenor, enraptured
with sacrifice.
What do I see,
he complains, notes
brightly rising
towards a sky
blank with promise.
Yet how healthy
the single contralto
settling deeper
into her watery furs!
Carry me home,
she cajoles, bearing
down. Candelabras
brim. But he slips
through God’s net and swims
heavenward, warbling.
The possum’s a greasy critter
that lives on persimmons and what
the Bible calls carrion.
So much from the 1909 Werner
Encyclopedia, three rows of deep green
along the wall. A granddaughter
propped on each knee,
Thomas went on with his tale—
but it was for Malcolm, little
Red Delicious, that he invented
embellishments: We shined that possum
with a torch and I shinnied up,
being the smallest,
to shake him down. He glared at me,
teeth bared like a shark’s
in that torpedo snout.
Man he was tough but no match
for old-time know-how.
Malcolm hung back, studying them
with his gold hawk eyes. When the girls
got restless, Thomas talked horses:
Strolling Jim, who could balance
a glass of water on his back
and trot the village square
without spilling a drop. Who put
Wartrace on the map and was buried
under a stone, like a man.
They liked that part.
He could have gone on to tell them
that the Werner admitted Negro children
to be intelligent, though briskness
clouded over at puberty, bringing
indirection and laziness. Instead,
he added: You got to be careful
with a possum when he’s on the ground;
he’ll turn on his back and play dead
till you give up looking. That’s
what you’d call sullin’.
Malcolm interrupted to ask
who owned Strolling Jim,
and who paid for the tombstone.
They stared each other down
man to man, before Thomas,
as a grandfather, replied:
Yessir,
we enjoyed that possum. We ate him
real slow, with sweet potatoes.
Later he’ll say Death stepped right up
to shake his hand, then squeezed
until he sank to his knees. (Get up,
nigger. Get up and try again.)
Much later he’ll admit he’d been afraid,
curled tight in the center of the rug, sunlight
striking one cheek and plaited raffia
scratching the other. He’ll leave out
the part about daydream’s aromatic fields
and the strap-worn flanks of the mule
he followed through them. When his wife asks
how did it feel, he won’t mention
that the sun shone like the summer
she was pregnant with their first, and
that she craved watermelon which he smuggled
home wrapped in a newspaper, and how
the bus driver smirked as his nickel
clicked through—no, he’ll say
it was like being kicked by a mule.
Right now, though, pinned to the bull’s-eye,
he knows it was Lem all along:
Lem’s knuckles tapping his chest in passing,
Lem’s heart, for safekeeping,
he shores up in his arms.
1.
What to do with a day.
Leaf through Jet. Watch T.V.
Freezing on the porch
but he goes anyhow, snow too high
for a walk, the ice treacherous.
Inside, the gas heater takes care of itself;
he doesn’t even notice being warm.
Everyone says he looks great.
Across the street a drunk stands smiling
at something carved in a tree.
The new neighbor with the floating hips
scoots out to get the mail
and waves once, brightly,
storm door clipping her heel on the way in.
2.
Twice a week he had taken the bus down Glendale Hill
to the corner of Market. Slipped through
the alley by the canal and let himself in.
Started to sweep
with terrible care, like a woman
brushing shine into her hair,
same motion, same lullaby.
No curtains—the cop on the beat
stopped outside once in the hour
to swing his billy club and glare.
It was better on Saturdays
when the children came along:
he mopped while they emptied
ashtrays, clang of glass on metal
then a dry scutter. Next they counted
nailheads studding the leather cushions.
Thirty-four! they shouted,
that was the year and
they found it mighty amusing.
But during the week he noticed more—
lights when they gushed or dimmed
at the Portage Hotel, the 10:32
picking up speed past the B & O switchyard,
floorboards trembling and the explosive
kachook kachook kachook kachook
and the oiled rails ticking underneath.
3.
They were poor then but everyone had been poor.
He hadn’t minded the sweeping,
just the thought of it—like now
when people ask him what he’s thinking
and he says I’m listening.
Those nights walking home alone,
the bucket of coal scraps banging his knee,
he’d hear a roaring furnace
with its dry, familiar heat. Now the nights
take care of themselves—as for the days,
there is the canary’s sweet curdled song,
the wino smiling through his dribble.
Past the hill, past the gorge
choked with wild sumac in summer,
the corner has been upgraded.
Still, he’d like to go down there someday
to stand for a while, and get warm.
This, then, the river he had to swim.
Through the wipers the drugstore
shouted, lit up like a casino,
neon script leering from the shuddering asphalt.
Then the glass doors flew apart
and a man walked out to the curb
to light a cigarette. Thomas thought
the sky was emptying itself as fast
as his chest was filling with water.
Should he honk? What a joke—
he couldn’t ungrip the steering wheel.
The man looked him calmly in the eye
and tossed the match away.
And now the street dark, not a soul
nor its brother. He lay down across
the seat, a pod set to sea,
a kiss unpuckering. He watched
the slit eye of the glove compartment,
the prescription inside,
he laughed as he thought Oh
the writing on the water. Thomas imagined
his wife as she awoke missing him,
cracking a window. He heard sirens
rise as the keys swung, ticking.