Call it the catalog
of mixed bloods, or
the book of naught:
not Spaniard, not white, but
mulatto-returning-backwards (or
hold-yourself-in-midair) and
the morisca, the lobo, the chino,
sambo, albino, and
the no-te-entiendo—the
I don’t understand you.
Guidebook to the colony,
record of each crossed birth,
it is the typology of taint,
of stain: blemish: sullying spot:
that which can be purified,
that which cannot—Canaan’s
black fate. How like a dirty joke
it seems: what do you call
that space between
the dark geographies of sex?
Call it the taint—as in
T’aint one and t’aint the other—
illicit and yet naming still
what is between. Between
her parents, the child,
mulatto-returning-backwards,
cannot slip their hold,
the triptych their bodies make
in paint, in blood: her name
written down in the Book
of Castas—all her kind
in thrall to a word.
Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata
After the painting by Diego Velázquez, c. 1619
She is the vessels on the table before her:
the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher
clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red
and upside-down. Bent over, she is the mortar,
and the pestle at rest in the mortar—still angled
in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls
and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung
by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled
in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.
She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow—
the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo
of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:
his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans
into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.
Knowledge
After a chalk drawing by J. H. Hasselhorst, 1864
Whoever she was, she comes to us like this:
lips parted, long hair spilling from the table
like water from a pitcher, nipples drawn out
for inspection. Perhaps to foreshadow
the object she’ll become: a skeleton on a pedestal,
a row of skulls on a shelf. To make a study
of the ideal female body, four men gather around her.
She is young and beautiful and drowned—
a Venus de’ Medici, risen from the sea, sleeping.
As if we could mistake this work for sacrilege,
the artist entombs her body in a pyramid
of light, a temple of science over which
the anatomist presides. In the service of beauty—
to know it—he lifts a flap of skin
beneath her breast as one might draw back a sheet.
We will not see his step-by-step parsing,
a translation: Mary or Katherine or Elizabeth
to corpus, areola, vulva. In his hands
instruments of the empirical—scalpel, pincers—
cold as the room must be cold: all the men
of her pubis. Now one man is smoking, another
tilts his head to get a better look. Yet another,
at the head of the table, peers down as if
enthralled, his fist on a stack of books.
In the drawing this is only the first cut,
a delicate wounding: and yet how easily
the anatomist’s blade opens a place in me,
like a curtain drawn upon a room in which
each learned man is my father
and I hear, again, his words—I study
my crossbreed child—misnomer
and taxonomy, the language of zoology. Here,
he is all of them: the preoccupied man—
an artist, collector of experience; the skeptic angling
his head, his thoughts tilting toward
what I cannot know; the marshaller of knowledge,
knuckling down a stack of books; even
the dissector—his scalpel in hand like a pen
poised above me, aimed straight for my heart.
III
The Americans
1. DR. SAMUEL ADOLPHUS CARTWRIGHT ON DISSECTING THE WHITE NEGRO, 1851
To strip from the flesh
the specious skin; to weigh
in the brainpan
seeds of white
pepper; to find in the body
its own diminishment—
blood-deep
and definite; to measure the heft
of lack; to make of the work of faith
the work of science, evidence
the word of God: Canaan
be the servant of servants; thus
to know the truth
of this: (this derelict
corpus, a dark compendium, this
atavistic assemblage—flatter
feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so
deep the tincture
—see it!—
we still know white from not.
2. BLOOD
After George Fuller’s The Quadroon, 1880
It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer
upon her, framed as she is in the painting’s
romantic glow, her melancholic beauty
meant to show the pathos of her condition:
black blood—that she cannot transcend it.
In the foreground she is shown at rest, seated,
her basket empty and overturned beside her
as though she would cast down the drudgery
to which she was born. A gleaner, hopeless
undine—the bucolic backdrop a dim aura
around her—she looks out toward us as if
to bridge the distance between. Mezzo,
intermediate, how different she’s rendered
from the dark kin working the fields behind her.
If not for the ray of light appearing as if from beyond
the canvas, we might miss them—three figures
in the near distance, small as afterthought.
3. HELP, 1968
After a photograph from The Americans by Robert Frank
When I see Frank’s photograph
of a white infant in the dark arms
of a woman who must be the maid,
I think of my mother and the year
we spent alone—my father at sea.
The woman stands in profile, back
their faces side by side—the look
on the child’s face strangely prescient,
a tiny furrow in the space
between her brows. Neither of them
looks toward the camera; nor
do they look at each other. That year,
when my mother took me for walks,
she was mistaken again and again
for my maid. Years later she told me
she’d say I was her daughter, and each time
strangers would stare in disbelief, then
empty the change from their pockets. Now
I think of the betrayals of flesh, how
she must have tried to make of her face
an inscrutable mask and hold it there
as they made their small offerings—
pressing coins into my hands. How
like the woman in the photograph
she must have seemed, carrying me
each day—white
in her arms—as if
she were a prop: a black backdrop,
the dark foil in this American story.
Mano Prieta
The green drapery is like a sheet of water
behind us—a cascade in the backdrop
of the photograph, a rushing current
that would scatter us, carry us each
away. This is 1969 and I am three—
still light enough to be nearly the color
of my father. His armchair is a throne
and I am leaning into him, propped
against his knees—his hand draped
across my shoulder. On the chair’s arm
my mother looms above me,
perched at the edge as though
she would fall off. The camera records
her single gesture. Perhaps to still me,
she presses my arm with a forefinger,
makes visible a hypothesis of blood,
its empire of words: the imprint
on my body of her lovely dark hand.
De Español y Negra; Mulata
After the painting by Miguel Cabrera, c. 1763
What holds me first is the stemmed fruit
in the child’s small hand, center
of the painting, then the word nearby: Texocotes,
a tiny inscription on the mother’s basket—
vessel from which, the scene suggests, the fruit
has been plucked. Read: exotic bounty
of the new world—basket, fruit; womb, child.
And still, what looks to be
tenderness: the father caressing
his daughter’s cheek, the painter’s light
finding him—his profile glowing as if
lit beneath the skin. Then, the dominion
of his touch: with one hand he holds
the long stem gingerly, pressing it
against her face—his gesture at once
possessing both. Flanked by her parents,
the child, in half-light, looks out as if
toward you, her left arm disappearing
behind her mother’s cloak. Such contrast—
how not to see it?—in the lush depths
of paint: the mother’s flat outline,
the black cloak making her blacker still,
the moon-white crescent of her eye
the only light in her face. In the foreground,
she gestures—a dark signal in the air—
her body advancing toward them
like spilled ink spreading on a page,
a great pendulum eclipsing the light.
Mythology
1. NOSTOS
Here is the dark night
of childhood—flickering
lamplight, odd shadows
on the walls—giant and flame
projected through the clear
frame of my father’s voice.
Here is the past come back
as metaphor: my father, as if
to ease me into sleep, reciting
the trials of Odysseus. Always
he begins with the Cyclops,
light at the cave’s mouth
bright as knowledge, the pilgrim
honing a pencil-sharp stake.
2. QUESTIONS POSED BY THE DREAM
It’s the old place on Jefferson Street
I’ve entered, a girl again, the house dark
and everyone sleeping—so quiet it seems
I’m alone. What can this mean now, more
than thirty years gone, to find myself
at the beginning of that long hallway
knowing, as I did then, what stands
at the other end? And why does the past
come back like this: looming, a human figure
formed—as if it had risen from the Gulf
—of the crushed shells that paved
our driveway, a sharp-edged creature
that could be conjured only by longing?
Why is it here blocking the dark passage
to my father’s bookshelves, his many books?
3. SIREN
In this dream I am driving
a car, strapped to my seat
like Odysseus to the mast,
my father calling to me
from the back—luring me
to a past that never was. This
is the treachery of nostalgia.
This is the moment before
a ship could crash onto the rocks,
the car’s back wheels tip over
a cliff. Steering, I must be
the crew, my ears deaf
to the sound of my father’s voice;
I must be the captive listener
cleaving to his words. I must be
singing this song to myself.
Geography
1.
At the bottom of the exit ramp
my father waits for us, one foot
on the curb, right hand hooked
in the front pocket of his jeans,
a stack of books beneath his arm.
It’s 1971, the last year we’re still
together. My mother and I travel
this road, each week, to meet him—
I-10 from Mississippi to New Orleans—
and each time we pull off the highway
I see my father like this: raising his thumb
to feign hitchhiking—a stranger
passing through to somewhere else.
2.