“Bread, toasted, with no skin.” And enough butter
To write her name in. Or a bowl of cereal (“But
Not the noisy kind”). She wants a movie, or maybe
Just the tussle of her will against mine,
That scrape and crack. Horn on rock. Rope
Relenting one fiber at a time. “I want that,” she says,
Punctuating what she just said she wanted.
DUSK
What woke to war in me those years
When my daughter had first grown into
A solid self-centered self? I’d watch her
Sit at the table—well, not quite sit,
More like stand on one leg while
The other knee hovered just over the chair.
She wouldn’t lower herself, as if
There might be a fire, or a great black
Blizzard of waves let loose in the kitchen,
And she’d need to make her escape. No,
She’d trust no one but herself, her own
New lean always jittering legs to carry her—
Where exactly? Where would a child go?
To there. There alone. She’d rest one elbow
On the table—the opposite one to the bent leg
Skimming the solid expensive tasteful chair.
And even though we were together, her eyes
Would go half-dome, shades dropped
Like a screen at some cinema the old aren’t
Let into. I thought I’d have more time! I thought
My body would have taken longer going
About the inevitable feat of repelling her,
But now, I could see even in what food
She left untouched, food I’d bought and made
And all but ferried to her lips, I could see
How it smacked of all that had grown slack
And loose in me. Her other arm
Would wave the fork around just above
The surface of the plate, casting about
For the least possible morsel, the tiniest
Grain of unseasoned rice. She’d dip
Into the food like one of those shoddy
Metal claws poised over a valley of rubber
Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing
Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute.
The narrow untouched hips. The shoulders
Still so naïve as to stand squared, erect,
Impervious facing the window open
Onto the darkening dusk.
URBAN YOUTH
You’d wake me for Saturday cartoons
When you were twelve and I was two.
Hong Kong Phooey, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids.
In the ’70s, everything shone bright as brass.
When you were twelve and I was two,
It was always autumn. Blue sky, flimsy clouds.
This was the ’70s. Every bright day a brass
Trombone slept, leaning in your room.
Autumn-crisp air. Blue skies. Clouds
Of steam clotted the window near the stove (and
Slept in the trombone kept in your room). You
Wrote a poem about the sea and never forgot it.
Steam clotted the window near the stove
Where Mom stood sometimes staring out.
I forget now what there was to see.
So much now gone was only then beginning.
Mom stood once looking out while you and
Dad and Mike taught me to ride a two-wheeler.
So much was only then beginning. Should
I have been afraid? The hedges hummed with bees,
But it was you and Dad and Mike teaching me to ride,
Running along beside until you didn’t have to hold on.
Who was afraid? The hedges thrummed with bees
That only sang. Every happy thing I’ve known,
You held, or ran alongside not having to hold.
THE EVERLASTING SELF
Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction—
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.
ANNUNCIATION
I feel ashamed, finally,
Of our magnificent paved roads,
Our bridges slung with steel,
Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights,
Everything enhanced, rehearsed,
A trick. I’ve turned old. I ache most
To be confronted by the real,
By the cold, the pitiless, the bleak.
By the red fox crossing a field
After snow, by the broad shadow
Scraping past overhead.
My young son, eyes set
At an indeterminate distance,
Ears locked, tuned inward, caught
In some music only he has ever heard.
Not our cars, our electronic haze.
Not the piddling bleats and pings
That cause some hearts to race.
Ashamed. Like a pebble, hard
And small, hoping only to be ground to dust
By something large and strange and cruel.
REFUGE
Until I can understand why you
Fled, why you are willing to bleed,
Why you deserve what I must be
Willing to cede, let me imagine
You are my mother in Montgomery,
Alabama, walking to campus
Rather than riding the bus. I know
What they call you, what they
Try to convince you you lack.
I know your tired ankles, the sudden
Thunder of your laugh. Until
I want to give you what I myself deserve,
Let me love you by loving her.
Your sister in a camp in Turkey,
Sixteen, deserving of everything:
Let her be my daughter, who has
Curled her neat hands into fists,
Have never loved her. Naomi,
Lips set in a scowl, young heart
Ransacking its cell. Let me lend
Her passion to your sister, and
Love her for her living rage, her
Need for more, and now, and all.
Let me leap from sleep if her voice
Sounds out, afraid, from down the hall.
I have seen men like your father
Walking up Harrison Street
Now that the days are getting longer.
Let me love them as I love my own
Father, whom I phoned once
From a valley in my life
To say what I feared I’d never
Adequately said, voice choked,
Stalled, hearing the silence spread
Around us like weather. What
Would it cost me to say it now,
To a stranger’s father, walking home
To our separate lives together?
AN OLD STORY
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
NOTES
“Hill Country” is for Bill Jo
hnson.
“Declaration” is an erasure poem drawn from the text of the Declaration of Independence.
“The Greatest Personal Privation” and “Unwritten” are for Nan and Erskine Clarke. Both are erasure poems drawn from correspondence between members of the Mary and Charles Colcock Jones family regarding the sale of slaves Patience, Porter, and their children, members of the Geechee/Gullah communities in Liberty County, Georgia. Early in his career as a Presbyterian minister, Jones contemplated supporting the abolition of slavery; he chose, instead, to work as a missionary and reformer in Liberty County, though he remained a slaveholder until his death in 1863. The history of the Joneses, and those enslaved on their plantations, is addressed in Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (Yale University Press, 2005).
The text for “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” is composed entirely of letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children. While the primary documents in question have been abridged, the poem preserves the original spellings and punctuation to the extent possible throughout.
I relied upon the following books in composing the poem:
Regosin, Elizabeth A., and Donald R. Shaffer, eds. Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Berlin, Ira, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era. New York: The New Press, 1997.
Once I began reading these texts, it became clear to me that the voices in question should command all of the space within my poem. I hope that they have been arranged in such a way as to highlight certain of the main factors affecting blacks during the Civil War, chiefly: the compound effects of slavery and war upon the African American family; the injustices to which black soldiers were often subject; the difficulty black soldiers and their widows faced in attempting to claim pensions after the war; and the persistence, good faith, dignity, and commitment to the ideals of democracy that ran through the many appeals to President Lincoln, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other authorities to whom petitions were routinely addressed during and after the war. Original sources are as follows:
November 21, 1864: Letter from Mrs. Jane Welcome to Abraham Lincoln
September 3, 1864: Letter from Spotswood Rice to his daughters
November 26, 1864: Affidavit of Joseph Miller
August 12, 1865: Letter from Norman Riley to Catherine Riley
August 25, 1864: Letter from Annie Davis to Abraham Lincoln
August 28, 1865: Letter from Catherine Riley to Norman Riley
December 7, 1866: Letter from Martin Lee to the head of the
Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia.
March 9, 1867: Letter from Harrison Smith to his sister-in-law, Minta Smith
The long italicized sections of the poem are compiled of numerous sources.
Stanza by stanza within each section, they are:
“Excellent Sir My son went in the 54th regiment—”:
Letter from Hannah Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, July 31, 1863
Letter from Members of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry to Abraham Lincoln, July 16, 1864
Unsigned letter to General Sickels, Jan. 13, 1866
Letter from Hiram A. Peterson to his father, Aaron Peterson, Oct. 24, 1863
Letter from Hannah Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, July 31, 1863
Unsigned letter to General Sickels, Jan. 13, 1866
Letter from Hiram A. Peterson to Aaron Peterson, Oct. 24, 1863
Letter from Aaron Peterson to Secretary of War, Hon. Edwin M. Stanten, Oct. 29, 1863
Letter from James Herney to Secretary Stanten, May 15, 1866
Letter from Hannah Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, July 31, 1863
Letter from Hiram A. Peterson to Aaron Peterson, Oct. 24, 1863
“I am 60 odd years of age—”:
Deposition of Ellen Wade, Nov. 21, 1906, Civil War Pension File of Walker Bettlesworth (alias Wade), 116th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Thomas W. Wilbourn, Apr. 14, 1909, Civil War Pension File of Thomas Wilbert (alias Thomas W. Wilbourn), 122nd USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Alice Bettlesworth (alias Wade), Nov. 21, 1906, Civil War Pension File of Walker Bettlesworth (alias Wade), 116th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Charles Franklin Crosby, June 19, 1914, Civil War Pension File of Frank Nunn (alias Charles Franklin Crosby), 86th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Emma Frederick, June 2, 1899, Civil War Pension file of Clement Frederick, 70th and 71st USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Hiram Kirkland, Nov. 26, 1902, Civil War Pension File of Hiram Kirkland, 101st and 110th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Charles Washington, Dec. 18, 1905, Civil War Pension File of Charles Washington, 47th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Emma Frederick, March 12, 1903
Deposition of Hiram Kirkland
Deposition of Emma Frederick, Apr. 11, 1903
Deposition of Thomas W. Wilbourn
Deposition of Charles Washington
Deposition of Alexander Porter, May 3, 1900, Civil War Pension File of Alexander Porter, 58th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Hiram Kirkland
Deposition of Revel Garrison, Sept. 10, 1888, Civil War Pension File of Revel Garrison, 2nd USCC, RG 15
Affidavit of Benjamin Courtney, Apr. 28, 1908, Civil War Pension File of Benjamin Courtney, 51st USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Charles Washington
Deposition of Robert Harrison, Apr. 11, 1890, Civil War Pension File of Robert Harris (alias Robert Harrison, alias John Wilson), RG 15
Deposition of Robert Harrison
Affidavit of William L. Dickerson, Oct. 23, 1902, William L. Dickinson (alias Dixon, Dickson, and Dickerson), 14th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Robert Harrison
Affidavit of Hannibal Sibley, Jan. 11, 1893, Civil War Pension File of Solomon Sibley, 63rd USCI, RG 15
Affidavit of Martin Campbell, June 10, 1889, Civil War Pension File of Dennis Campbell, 63rd USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Louis Jourdan, May 27, 1915, Civil War Pension File of Louis Jourdan, 77th USCI and 10th USCHA, RG 15
Deposition of Dick Lewis Barnett, May 17, 1911, Civil War Pension File of Lewis Smith (alias Dick Lewis Barnett), 77th USCI and 10th USCHA, RG 15
Deposition of Mary Jane Taylor, May 13, 1919, Civil War Pension File of Samuel Taylor, 45th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Charles Franklin Crosby, June 19, 1914, Civil War Pension File of Frank Nunn (alias Charles Franklin Crosby), 86th USCI, RG 15
Deposition of Dick Lewis Barnett
Deposition of Hiram Kirkland
Italicized lines in “Theatrical Improvisation” quote from and are based upon the following real-life sources:
Reported attacks on Muslim American women in the days after the 2016 presidential election as collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Comments by Andrew Anglin: “Fear. Now is the time for it. … We want these people to feel that everything around them is against them. And we want them to be afraid,” from a November 10, 2016, post to neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website entitled “Female Hajis Fear to Wear the Headtowel in Public after Trump Win—You Should Yell at Them.”
In 2015 fifty-eight-year-old Guillermo Rodriguez, a homeless Latino immigrant, was attacked while sleeping outside a Boston commuter rail station. One of his assailants, Scott Leader, told police the violence was acceptable because the victim was homeless and Hispanic. Reuters, May 17, 2016.
Comments by Patrick Stein, member of an antigovernment group called the Crusaders, who was arrested after allegedly finalizing plans to blow up an apartment complex housing more than 100 Somali-born, Muslim immigrants and a small mosque: “The only fucking way this country’s ever going to get turned around is it will
be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back … we might be too late, if they do wake up … I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it,” United States of America, Plaintiff v. Curtis Wayne Allen, Patrick Eugene Stein, and Gavin Wayne Wright, Defendants.
Exhibitions of artwork by refugee children from Sudan (2005) and Syria (2017).
“Watershed” is a found poem drawn from two sources: a New York Times Magazine January 6, 2016, article by Nathaniel Rich entitled, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” and excerpts of the narratives of survivors of near-death experiences as catalogued on www.nderf.org.
“Eternity” is set in Beijing, China, and its environs. The poem’s penultimate section is for Yi Lei.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals, who first published versions of these poems: The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” the Awl, Callaloo, Cave Wall, the Cortland Review, Harvard Review, the Nation, the New Yorker, Tin House, and TriQuarterly.
“Garden of Eden” was the 2017 Commencement Poem of St. Francis College.
“Realm of Shades” appears in Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (TriQuarterly Books, 2017).
“I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” was written to accompany the Civil War 150th exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery in 2011. It appears in the folio Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration: Poems and Photographs, Past and Present (Smithsonian Books, 2013).
“Ghazal” was written for The Ecstasy of St. Kara: Kara Walker, New Work (The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2016).
“New Road Station” was written for broadcast on the All Things Considered “News Poet” feature on National Public Radio.
“Unrest in Baton Rouge” was written for broadcast on WNYC’s Studio 360.
“Urban Youth” is for Conrad.
“Annunciation” appears in Liverpool Presents Sgt Pepper at 50 for the city’s celebration May 25 to June 16, 2017.