Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
TO MY DAUGHTERS AND GRANDDAUGHTER:
KIMBERLY, SHOSHANA, AND IMANI
MOJO SONGS
(NEW POEMS)
A WORLD OF DAUGHTERS
Say licked clean at birth. Say
weeping in the tall grass, where
this tantalizing song begins,
birds paused on a crooked branch
over a grave of an unending trek
into the valley of cooling waters.
Lessons of earth, old questions
unmoor the first tongue. Say
I have gone back, says the oracle,
counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault
lines between one generation & next,
as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen,
& one glimpses what one did not know. Say
this is where the goat was asked to speak
legends ago, to kneel & deliver a sacrifice.
To feel a truth depends on how & why
the singer’s song fits into the mouth.
Well, I believe the borrowed-rib
story is the other way round, entangled
in decree, blessing, law, & myth. One
only has to listen to nightlong pleas
of a mother who used all thousand
chants & prayers of clay, red ocher
blown from the mouth upon the high
stone wall, retracing a final land bridge
to wishbone. My own two daughters
& granddaughter, the three know how
to work praise & lament, ready to sprout
wings of naked flight & labor. Yes,
hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy
to clan, from clan to tribe, & today
we worship her sun-polished bones,
remembering she is made of questions.
No, mama is not always a first word
before counting eggs in the cowbird’s
nest. It begins in memory. Now, say
her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.
OUR SIDE OF THE CREEK
We piled planks, sheets of tin,
& sandbags across the creek
till the bright water rose
& splayed both sides,
swelling into our hoorah.
Our hard work brought July
thrashers & fat June bugs
in decades of dead leaves.
Water moccasins hid in holes
at the brim of the clay bank
as the creek eased up pelvic
bones, hips, navel, & chest,
to eyelevel. When the boys
dove into our swim hole
we pumped our balled fists
to fire up their rebel yells.
The Jim Crow birds sang
of persimmon & mayhaw
after a 12-gauge shotgun
sounded in the mossy woods.
If we ruled the day an hour
the boys would call girl cousins
& sisters, & they came running
but we could outrun the sunset
through sage & rabbit tobacco,
born to hide each other’s alibis
beneath the drowned sky.
SLINGSHOT
A boy’s bicycle inner tube
red as inside the body,
a well-chosen forked limb
sawed from a shrub oak,
& then an hour-long squint
to get it right. The taut pull is
everything. There’s nothing
without resistance, & the day
holds. The hard, slow, steady
honing flips a beetle on its back,
but the boy refuses to squash it.
He continues with his work.
Summer rambles into a quiet
quantum of dogwood & gum—
a girl he’s too shy to tell his name
stands in damp light nearing dark,
& biting a corner of his lip
he whittles the true stock,
knowing wrong from right.
Though Pythagoras owned
a single truth, the boy
untangles a triangle of pull
within a triangle of release,
the slingshot’s tongue a tongue
torn out of an old army boot,
& Lord, what a perfect fit.
Feet spread apart, the boy
straddles an imaginary line,
settling quietly into himself
as the balance & pull travel
down through his fingers,
forearm, elbow, into muscle,
up through his shoulder blades,
neck, mouth, set of the jaw,
into the register of the brain,
saying, Take a breath & exhale
slowly, then let the stone fly
as if it has swallowed a stone,
& that is when the boy knows
his body is a compass, a cross.
A PRAYER FOR WORKERS
Bless the woman, man, & child
who honor earth by opening shine
inside the soil—the splayed hour
between dampness & dust—to plant
seedlings in double furrows, & then pray
for cooling rain. Bless the fields,
the catch, the hunt, & the wild fruit,
& let no one go hungry tonight
or tomorrow. Let the wind & birds
seed a future ferried into villages
& towns the other side of mountains
along nameless rivers. Bless those
born with hands made to grapple
hewn timbers & stone raised from earth
& shaped in circles, who know the geometry
of corners, & please level the foundation
& pitch a roof so good work isn’t diminished
by rain. Bless the farmer with clouds
in his head, who lugs baskets of dung
so termites can carve their hives
that hold water long after a downpour
has gone across the desert & seeds
sprout into a contiguous greening.
Bless the iridescent beetle working
to haul the heavens down, to journey
from red moondust to excrement.
The wage slave two-steps from Dickens’s
tenements among a den of thieves,
blind soothsayers who know shambles
where migrants feathered the nests
of straw bosses as the stonecutters
perfect profiles of robber barons
in granite & marble in town squares
along highways paved for Hollywood.
Bless souls laboring in sweatshops,
& each calabash dipper of water,
the major & minor litanies & ganglia
dangling from promises at the mou
th
of the cave, the catcher of vipers at dawn
in the canebrake & flowering fields,
not for love of money but for bread
& clabber on a thick gray slab table,
for the simple blessings in a hamlet
of the storytellers drunk on grog.
Bless the cobbler, molding leather
on his oaken lasts, kneading softness
& give into a red shoe & a work boot,
never giving more to one than the other,
& also the weaver with closed eyes
whose fingers play the ties & loops
as if nothing else matters, daybreak
to sunset, as gritty stories of a people
grow into an epic stitched down
through the ages, the outsider artists
going from twine & hue, cut & tag,
an ironmonger’s credo of steam rising
from buckets & metal dust, & the clang
of a hammer against an anvil,
& the ragtag ones, a whole motley crew
at the end of the line, singing ballads
& keeping time on a battered tin drum.
THE CANDLELIGHT LOUNGE
All the little doors unlock
in the brain as the saxophone
nudges the organ & trap drums
till an echo of the Great Migration
tiptoes up & down the bass line.
Faces in semi-dark cluster around
a solo, edging toward a town of steel
& car lines driven by conveyor belts.
But now only a sign stutters across
the Delaware, saying, Trenton Makes
The World Takes. With one eye
on the players at the Candlelight
& the other on televised Olympians
home is a Saturday afternoon
around the kidney-shaped bar.
These songs run along dirt roads
& highways, crisscross lonely seas
& scale mountains, traverse skies
& underworlds of neon honkytonk,
wherever blues dare to travel.
A swimmer climbs a diving board
in Beijing, does a springy toe dance
on the edge, turns her head
toward us, & seems to say, Okay,
you guys, now see if you can play this.
She executes a backflip,
a triple spin, a half twist,
held between now & then,
& jackknifes through the water,
& it is what pours out of the horn.
SHELTER
Becky grew up in the provinces of the blackest, richest Delta silt this side of cut & run. When the wind rampaged in from the east she could taste the soil, & naturally it was biblical. The boy came one June morning to work on her daddy’s egg farm. Both were fourteen—he three days older than she. His job was to feed the two-thousand-odd white leghorn hens, to gather the pearly ovals in baskets & carry them to the grading shed where Stella cleaned off flecks of shit & held each egg up to a beaming light, then placed them into white dozen-size papery cartons. Sometimes Becky worked beside the tall black woman for the fun of it, mirroring her moves. Also, she liked looking at the boy gathering the eggs. But they didn’t dare let anyone else see their catlike eyes. In their four years of stolen kisses they grew into each other. They’d lie in the tall grass, trembling in an embrace. But one day the boy enlisted in the army. Stella would say, “Miz Becky, I know a lady who can take that spell off ya.” Of course, Becky would say, “I don’t know what you talkin ’bout, Stella.” A year later, Becky married Buster Collins from across the river. The couple built a nice brick bungalow two miles down the road. She kept saying, “Buster, I wanna baby.” Three years passed. The boy came back. He began driving a tractor & trailer across country. To this day Becky can’t say why she slipped Stella the note to give him. When the setting sun lights the door of the hayloft. The two began to meet. It didn’t make sense, they both declared. But one night they caught themselves in the bedroom while Buster sat in the living room watching championship wrestling, drinking his bottles of Dixie. The boy almost called Buster’s name. He whispered to Becky, “Never again.” She pounded her fists against his chest, saying, “Over my dead body.” That was the night she ran from the bedroom crying. That was the night she told the sheriff the window was open but she only heard bullfrogs in the gully before she felt his knife at her throat. She didn’t holler because she saw murder in his eyes. When the sheriff & his two deputies stopped the truck at the state line, the sheriff said, “Boys, looka here, a dead nigger drivin a big fancy rig to hell.” He didn’t try telling them his side of the story. If he had, they would’ve killed him on the spot. Mayflies clogged the air. They dragged him bloody into a jail cell. A hoot owl called. Just before daybreak the mob appeared. The sheriff handed over the keys. Years later, after what happened, his name was the answer to an unspeakable divination. It had something to do with a tin coffee can of charred bones & ashes in a shoebox of dried rose petals. Becky said there are legends that eat graveyard clay, though she never could wrap her mind ’round that one. She caught a sundown Greyhound headed north & thought of Stella’s drinking gourd. Its orangey-gold hue. Now, she sits on a midnight curb in a ghetto, beckoning to whatever danger walks near, still trying to decide what Billie Joe McAllister & that girl tossed off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Was it life or death? Or some damnable other something, a heavy lodestone? Becky always had an imagination to die for. Hadn’t that song showed her feet the highway? Now, after all these years, all the other stories were balled up in hers. She gazes up crook-eyed at the sky, a Delta sunset tamped down into her bones, & now a limp easing into her left leg.
THE MUSHROOM GATHERERS
The hard work of love sealed
in language has stolen me far
from home, from the fields,
& I see morning mist rising
where they borrow ghosts
to get even with each other,
harvesting vegetable & fruit
close as we can get to dirt.
I glimpse shadows smudged
in trees lining the highway
where night & day commingle,
or as a season moves this slow hour,
saying, Bad things happened here.
At first, the figures seem to be
staring into earth, like migrants
who work Florida & California,
unearthing what we live to eat.
We know the men from women
by the colors they wear, sweat
ringing their lives in gray shade,
& our bus makes the mushroom
gatherers with pails & canvas bags
blur among the trees as if shutters
are opening & closing, as the mind
runs to keep up. But the road forks
here in eastern Europe, & I hardly
can see faces in the door of leaves.
The women know where to stand
in the clearing, how each trucker
slows down to make the curve,
& cannot miss yellow or purple.
He honks his loud bluesy horn,
idling at the bottom of the hill
on a thin shoulder of blacktop.
AFTER THE BURN PITS
The battle begins here as I slap my chest
with the palm of my hand, a talking drum
under the skin. It’s hard to believe men
once marched into fire blowing bagpipes
& fifes. Thunder & lightning can disarm us
like IEDs & RPGs. We say to ourselves,
Keep a cool head, & don’t forget the pass
& review. Salute the dead but don’t linger.
The rank & file are you & I. But mother of
courage knows the weight of ammo belts,
to zigzag across dunes & around acacias,
& to never forget the smell of a burn pit.
Draw down face
s of battle on a sketch pad.
But the pigment of ink-jets will never be
blood & skin worked into an anthem.
The drawings dare us to step closer, to look
into our eyes reflected in the glass, framed
by the camera’s automatic mind. To follow
songs of the Highwaymen is one way not
to fight oneself in a parade of mirrors.
To lie down in a desert & not think war,
white grains on the skin. To question
is to be human. To interrogate shadows
or go into terrain & unweave the map.
To lag over the small moments ferries us
across rivers. To stand naked before a mirror
& count the parts is to question the whole
season of sowing & reaping thorns.
THE MOUNTAIN
In the hard, unwavering mountain
light, black flags huddle at the foot of the mountain.
Hours are days & nights, a ragged map
of hungry faces trapped on the mountain.
But silence swears help is on its way,
formations rolling toward the mountain.
Blood of the sacred yew & stud goat
beg repose midpoint of the mountain
& prayers rise in August’s predawn gruff.
Artillery halts at the foot of the mountain.
Help is on its way, but don’t question
the music burning toward the mountain.
Infidels size up their easy targets, flying
skull & bone as villainy scales the mountain.
It could be a beautiful day but black flags
throng around the base of the mountain.
The red-wing kite has come to pinpoint
a medieval hour, circling the mountain.
Men, women, & children change rags of rebirth
lost in the double shadow of the mountain,
& a ghost of gunmetal drones overhead
& slowly turns, translating the mountain,
then stops midair, before drumming down
the black flags at the foot of the mountain.
DEAD RECKONING III
They work fingers to bone, & borrow
smudged paper, then make promises
to family, unmerciful gods, the unborn.
Some eat a favorite meal three times
in a row. Others partake only a pinch