Only know the sound of my uncle’s voice,
stopping me before my name is
a part of the history—like the ones on the roofs
and fire escapes and subway cars. I wish
I could explain.
Wish I had the words
to stop his anger, stop the force of him grabbing my hand,
wish I knew how to say,
Just let me write—everywhere!
But my uncle keeps asking over and over again,
What’s wrong with you?
Have you lost your mind?
Don’t you know people get arrested
for this?
They’re just words, I whisper.
They’re not trying to hurt anybody!
music
Each morning the radio comes on at seven o’clock.
Sometimes Michael Jackson is singing that A-B-C
is as easy as 1-2-3
or Sly and the Family Stone are thanking us for
letting them
be themselves.
Sometimes it’s slower music, the Five Stairsteps
telling us
things are going to get easier, or the Hollies singing,
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
So on we go . . .
My mother lets us choose what music we want
to listen to
as long as the word funk doesn’t appear anywhere
in the song.
But the summer I am ten, funk is in every single song
that comes on the cool black radio stations. So our
mother makes us listen
to the white ones.
All afternoon corny people sing about Colorado,
about everything being beautiful
about how we’ve only just begun.
My sister falls in love
with the singers but I sneak off
to Maria’s house where
safe inside her room with the pink shag carpet
and bunk beds,
we can comb our dolls’ hair and sing along when
the Ohio Players say,
He’s the funkiest
Worm in the world.
We can dance
the Funky Chicken, tell imaginary intruders
to get the funk out
of our faces. Say the word so hard and so loud
and so many times,
it becomes something different to us—something
so silly
we laugh just thinking about it.
Funky, funky, funky,
we sing again and again until the word is just a sound
not connected to anything
good or bad
right or wrong.
rikers island
When the phone call comes in the middle of the night,
it isn’t
to tell us someone has died. It’s Robert
calling from a prison called Rikers Island.
Even from my half-asleep place,
I can hear my mother taking a heavy breath, whispering,
I knew this was coming, Robert. I knew you weren’t
doing right.
In the morning, we eat our cereal in silence as
our mother tells us
that our uncle won’t be around for a while.
When we ask where he’s gone, she says, Jail.
When we ask why, she says,
It doesn’t matter. We love him.
That’s all we need to know and keep remembering.
Robert walked the wide road, she says. And now
he’s paying for it.
Witnesses believe there’s a wide road and a narrow road.
To be good in the eyes of God is to walk the narrow one,
live a good clean life, pray, do what’s right.
On the wide road, there is every kind of bad thing anyone
can imagine. I imagine my uncle doing his smooth
dance steps down the wide road,
smiling as the music plays loud. I imagine
him laughing, pressing quarters into our palms,
pulling presents for us from his bag, thick gold
bracelet flashing at his wrist.
Where’d you get this? my mother asked, her face tight.
It doesn’t matter, my uncle answered. Y’all know I love you.
You doing the right thing, Robert? my mother wanted
to know. Yes, my uncle said. I promise you.
It rains all day. We sit around the house
waiting for the sun to come out so we can go outside.
Dell reads in the corner of our room. I pull out
my beat-up composition notebook
try to write another butterfly poem.
Nothing comes.
The page looks like the day—wrinkled and empty
no longer promising anyone
anything.
moving upstate
From Rikers Island, my uncle is sent
to a prison upstate we can visit.
We don’t know what he’ll look like, how
much he’ll have changed. And because our mother
warns us not to, I don’t tell anyone he’s in jail.
When my friends ask, I say, He moved upstate.
We’re going to visit him soon.
He lives in a big house, I say. With a big yard and everything.
But the missing settles inside of me. Every time
James Brown comes on the radio, I see Robert dancing.
Every time the commercial for the Crissy doll comes on
I think how I almost got one.
He’s my favorite uncle, I say one afternoon.
He’s our ONLY uncle, my sister says.
Then goes back to reading.
on the bus to dannemora
We board the bus when the sun is just kissing the sky.
Darkness like a cape that we wear for hours, curled into it
and back to sleep. From somewhere above us
the O’Jays are singing, telling people all over the world
to join hands and start a love train.
The song rocks me gently into and out of dreaming
and in the dream, a train filled with love goes on and on.
And in the story that begins from the song, the bus
is no longer a bus and we’re no longer going to
Dannemora. But there is food and laughter and
the music. The girl telling the story is me but
not me at the same time—watching all of this,
writing it down as fast as she can,
singing along with the O’Jays, asking everyone
to let this train keep on riding . . .
“riding on through . . .”
and it’s the story of a whole train filled
with love and how the people on it
aren’t in prison but are free to dance
and sing and hug their families whenever they want.
On the bus, some of the people are sleeping, others
are staring out the window or talking softly.
Even the children are quiet. Maybe each of them
is thinking
their own dream—of daddies and uncles, brothers
and cousins
one day being free to come on board.
Please don’t miss this train at the station
‘Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you.
too good
The bus moves slow out of the city until we can see
the mountains, and above that, so much blue sky.
Passing the mountains.
Passing the sea
Passing the heavens.
That’s soon where I will be . . .
A song comes to me quickly, the words moving through
my brain and out of my mouth in a whisper but still
my sister hears, asks who taught it to me.
I just made it up, I say.
No you didn’t, she says back. It’s too good. Someone
taught that to you.
I don’t say anything back. Just look out the window
and smile.
Too good, I am thinking. The stuff I make up is too good.
dannemora
At the gate of the prison, guards glare at us, then slowly
allow us in.
My big brother is afraid.
He looks up at the barbed wire
puts his hands in his pockets.
I know he wishes he was home with his chemistry set.
I know he wants to be anywhere but here.
Nothing but stone and a big building that goes so far up
and so far back and forth that we can’t see
where the beginning is
or where it might end. Gray brick, small windows
covered with wire. Who could see
out from here? The guards check our pockets,
check our bags, make us
walk through X-ray machines.
My big brother holds out his arms. Lets the guards pat him
from shoulder to ankle, checking
for anything he might be hiding . . .
He is Hope Austin Woodson the Second, part of a long line
of Woodsons—doctors and lawyers and teachers—
but as quickly as THAT! he can become
a number. Like Robert Leon Irby is now
so many numbers across the pocket
of his prison uniform that it’s hard
not to keep looking at them,
waiting for them to morph into letters
that spell out
my uncle’s name.
not robert
When the guard brings our uncle to the waiting room
that is filled with other families
waiting, he is not
Robert. His afro is gone now,
shaved to a black shadow on his perfect skull.
His eyebrows are thicker than I remember, dipping down
in a newer, sadder way. Even when he smiles,
opens his arms
to hug all of us at once, the bit I catch of it, before
jumping into his hug, is a half smile, caught
and trapped inside a newer, sadder
uncle.
mountain song
On the way home from visiting Robert,
I watch the mountains move past me
and slowly the mountain song starts coming again
more words this time, coming faster
than I can sing them.
Passing the mountains
Passing the sea
Passing the heavens
waiting for me.
Look at the mountains
Such a beautiful sea
And there’s a promise that heaven
is filled with glory.
I sing the song over and over again,
quietly into the windowpane, my forehead
pressed against the cool glass. Tears coming fast now.
The song makes me think of Robert and Daddy
and Greenville
and everything that feels far behind me now, everything
that is going
or already gone.
I am thinking if I can hold on to the memory of this song
get home and write it down, then it will happen,
I’ll be a writer. I’ll be able to hold on to
each moment, each memory
everything.
poem on paper
When anyone in the family asks
what I’m writing, I usually say,
Nothing
or
A story
or
A poem
and only my mother says,
Just so long as you’re not writing about our family.
And I’m not.
Well, not really . . .
Up in the mountains
far from the sea
there’s a place called Dannemora
the men are not free . . .
daddy
It is early spring
when my grandmother sends for us.
Warm enough to believe again
that food will come from the newly thawed earth.
This is the weather, my mother says, Daddy loved
to garden in. We arrive
not long before my grandfather is about to take
his last breaths,
breathless ourselves from our first ride
in an airplane.
I want to tell him all about it
how loud it was when the plane lifted into the sky,
each of us, leaning toward the window,
watching New York
grow small and speckled beneath us.
How the meals arrived
on tiny trays—some kind of fish that none of us ate.
I want to tell him how the stewardess gave us wings
to pin to our blouses and shirts and told Mama
we were beautiful and well behaved. But
my grandfather is sleeping when we come to his bedside,
can press ice cubes against his lips. She tells us,
He needs his rest now. That evening
he dies.
On the day he is buried, my sister and I wear white dresses,
the boys in white shirts and ties.
We walk slowly through Nicholtown, a long parade
of people
who loved him—Hope, Dell, Roman and me
leading it. This is how we bury our dead—a silent parade
through the streets, showing the world our sadness, others
who knew my grandfather joining in on the walk,
children waving,
grown-ups dabbing at their eyes.
Ashes to ashes, we say at the grave site
with each handful of dirt we drop gently onto his
lowering casket.
We will see you in the by and by, we say.
We will see you in the by and by.
how to listen #7
Even the silence
has a story to tell you.
Just listen. Listen.
after greenville #2
After Daddy dies
my grandmother sells the house in Nicholtown
gives the brown chair to Miss Bell,
Daddy’s clothes to the Brothers at the Kingdom Hall,
the kitchen table and bright yellow chairs
to her sister Lucinda in Fieldcrest Village.
After Daddy dies
my grandmother brings the bed our mother was born in
to Brooklyn. Unpacks her dresses
in the small empty bedroom
downstairs,
puts her Bible, Watchtowers and Awakes,
a picture of Daddy
on the little brown bookshelf.
After Daddy dies
spring blurs into summer
then winter comes on too cold and fast,
and my grandmother moves a chair to the living room
window
watches the tree drop the last of its leaves
while boys play skelly and spinning tops in the middle
of our quiet Brooklyn street.
After Daddy dies
I learn to jump double Dutch slowly
tripping again and again over my too-big feet. Counting,
Ten, twenty, thirty, forty deep into the winter until
one afternoon
gravity releases me and my feet fly free in the ropes,
fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety . . .
as my grandmother watches me.
Both of our worlds
changed forever.
mimosa tree
A mimosa tree, green and thin limbed, pushes up through
the snow. My grandmother brought the seeds with her
from back home.
Sometimes, she pulls a chair to the window, looks
down over the yard.
The promise of glittering sidewalks feels a long time
behind us now, no diamonds anywhere to be found.
But some days, just after snow falls,
the sun comes out, shines down on the promise
of that tree from back home joining us here.
Shines down over the bright white ground.
And on those days, so much light and warmth fills
the room that it’s hard not to believe
in a little bit
of everything.
bubble-gum cigarettes
You can buy a box of bubble-gum cigarettes for a dime
at the bodega around the corner.
Sometimes, Maria and I walk there,
our fingers laced together, a nickel
in each of our pockets.
The bubble gum is pink with white paper
wrapped around it. When you put it in your mouth
and blow, a white puff comes out.
You can really believe
you’re smoking.
We talk with the bubble-gum cigarettes
between our fingers. Hold them in the air
like the movie stars on TV. We let them dangle
from our mouths and look at each other
through slitted eyes
then laugh at how grown-up we can be