when strings are struck,
reaching down through muscle memory
to a shelter of mud bricks baked under
three thousand years of sunlight,
from the goatherd to the King
of Kings, to Bob Marley. If Ethiopia
opens in the long Egyptian trumpets
or natural blues of the saxophone,
there’s little pomp & circumstance
in this earthy instrument
raised between violin & crossbow,
to dance with, or embrace.
When it speaks, especially
to the drum, this sounding-loom
is the voice of a nation
bargaining with the gods.
DEAD RECKONING II
In a half-broken room of the hospice
the bent figure on a bed is far from Osibisa
or his twenty-four-hour rock ’n’ roll gig
in England. Now, fame is a tale mermaids
tell fishermen, but all I want to know is
where are Kiki Djan’s friends & lovers,
his millions? His eyes stop us at the foot
of the bed. Outside, migratory birds
fly in the shape of a falling garment.
He hugs a tape recorder, head swaying
to an unreleased recording cut overseas.
The hum of an insect can hold his gaze
for hours, the ancestors at a side door.
The song is his only possession, fingers
on the keyboard only a little howl lost
in a trade wind nudging a pirate ship.
His eyes tell us all the tangled paths
taken, & now he must be a Lindbergh
who crossed the sleepless Atlantic.
To fully master out-of-body travel
by dead reckoning, one has to know
all the overtime shadows of obeah
working around the clock in Accra.
He stares at the buzz of a bluebottle
throbbing against the windowpane.
A NIGHT IN TUNISIA
How long have I listened
to this blues & how long
has Dizzy Gillespie been dead?
I remember an old longing,
a young man reaching
for luck, a finger poised
between pages of Baldwin’s
Notes of a Native Son, a clock
stopped for a hard, crystal-
clear moment. This was
a lifetime before the night
streets of Tunisia burned
on cell phones in the clouds,
tear gas & machine-gun fire
& my head in my hands
an hour. I traveled there
many times, humble
side streets & sweetness
of figs, hot seasons of meat
on the bone, naked feeling,
& Dizzy’s horn still ablaze,
a bleat of big fat notes
in the dark. Even if I’d never
stepped above simple laws,
my youth had betrayed me
with years still to come
& jasmine in bloom.
THE GREEN HORSE
The kneeling figure is from Yama or Carthage,
& I ask, What was his worth in gold, in salt,
spices, statuary, or commemorated axioms?
L, if we weren’t brave enough to believe
we could master time, we wouldn’t have
locked hands with old gods smelted down
in shops where crosses were etched above doors,
pressed into the coinage of a new empire,
& palm readers flogged in the market.
But of course there sits Marcus Aurelius
with stoic meditations on a borrowed tongue,
gazing out at sublime poppies, an eternal
battlefield, his hand extended as a scepter
over the piazza where his bronze horse
cantered up onto Michelangelo’s pedestal
carved from marble steps of the temple
of Castor & Pollux, & we wait for him
to outflank the epochs of wind & rain.
L, everything around here is an epitaph.
Even the light. This morning, squinting out
a window as rays play off a stone cistern,
I hear someone whisper, “Waste no time
arguing about what a good man should be,
the worms will give us their verdict
by nightfall.” I don’t know who said this,
Antiquity, here’s my barbarian shadow
squatting under the horse’s raised right hoof.
ODE TO THE OUD
Gourd-shaped muse swollen
with wind in the mulberry,
tell me everything you’re made of,
little desert boat of Ra.
Oblong box of Bedouin doves
pecking pomegranate seeds out of the air,
you’re the poet’s persona, his double
in the high priest’s third chamber,
each string a litany of stars over the Sahara.
Pear-shaped traveler, strong but so light,
is there a wishbone holding you together?
I wish I knew how to open you up
with an eagle’s feather or a pick
whittled from buffalo horn,
singing alive the dust of Nubia.
Rosewood seasoned long ago,
I wish I could close your twelve mouths
with kisses. Tongues strung in a row,
I wish I could open every sound in you.
I envy one blessed to master himself
by rocking you in his lonely arms.
Little ship of sorrow, bend your voice
till the names of heroes & courtesans,
birds & animals, prayers & love songs,
swarm from your belly.
ENVOY TO PALESTINE
I’ve come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to place a few red anemones
& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave.
A borrowed line transported me beneath
a Babylonian moon & I found myself
lucky to have the shadow of a coat
as warmth, listening to a poet’s song
of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string
Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute.
I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.
The land I come from they also dreamt
before they arrived in towering ships
battered by the hard Atlantic winds.
Crows followed me from my home.
My coyote heart is an old runagate
redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota,
& I knew the bow before the arch.
I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses
& insects singing to me. My sacred dead
is the dust of restless plains I come from,
& I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth
telling me of the roads behind & ahead.
I go back to broken treaties & smallpox,
the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy
could be a reprobate whose inheritance
is no more than a swig of firewater.
The sun made a temple of the bones
of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed
& extinct animals live in your nightmares
sharp as shark teeth from my mountains
strung into this brave necklace around
my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear
saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,”
& now I know why I’d rather die a poet
than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.
TIMBUKTU
I sing an elegy for the city of 333 saints,
for every crumbling mosque & minaret,
for the libraries standing for centuries
against dust storms, for the nomads
herding trees of life across the desert
along trails where camels hauled salt
to rafts woven on the river Niger
before the empire of Songhai fell.
The griots speak of an epic memory
of stardust in sand, but now mercenaries
kidnap, run drugs, & kill in bold daylight.
Blood money brought them into Libya,
& more blood money took them home
brandishing stolen guns & grenades.
When Lord Byron intones in Don Juan
“Where geography finds no one to oblige her”
I hear my name. But no one stands up
to prophecies the other side of limbo
against the modern as a metallic eye
drones overhead. Medieval clouds
may promise safe passage or escape
routes out of Mali, but the God-fearing
cannot remember the faces of death
after kicking in all the drums.
GHAZAL, AFTER FERGUSON
Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate
what’s going down in the streets.
No, an attitude is not a suicide note
written on walls around the streets.
Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe
as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets,
but only each day bears witness
in the echo chamber of the streets.
Grandmaster Flash’s thunderclap says
he’s not the grand jury in the streets,
says he doesn’t care if you’re big or small
fear can kill a man on the streets.
Take back the night. Take killjoy’s
cameras & microphones to the streets.
If you’re holding the hand lightning strikes
juice will light you up miles from the streets
where an electric chair surge dims
all the county lights beyond the streets.
Who will go out there & speak laws
of motion & relativity in the streets?
Yusef, this morning proves a crow
the only truth serum in the street.
INTERROGATION
He picks till it grows
into a tiny butterfly,
a transfigured bee-
shaped wound,
& then into a secret icon
filled with belief,
bloody philosophy,
& a drop of stardust.
A moment of half-
dead radiance
pulses on his skin
till his mouth closes
on a phrase in Latin,
& he wonders if an oath
leaves a scar.
He can’t hear
the nightlong voice
recant in the bell tower,
or the wasp’s torn wings
lifting hints of light
in the spider’s web.
When thought is
tissue, or a string
of dust that sings for rain,
unforgivable hours
divide into testimonies
delivered by the wind,
saying, Forget.
He tries not to pick
at the mute evidence
of the recent past,
letting pop songs
bleed over him
on the radio.
He lifts the scab
with a fingernail,
till the almost healed
opens its little doubtful
mouth of resignation,
till he can gaze down
into himself & see
where eternity begins.
PRECIOUS METALS
After the MRI & robot
made of precious metals,
some heretical go-between
shouted all the tautologies
& fruitless apologies to the planet.
I came to you, saying, Please
look into my eyes & tap a finger
against my heart to undo
every wrong I’ve ever done,
every infraction done to me
in the country of crab apple
& honeysuckle. I want to
toy with each blade of grass
& ripening plum, to suck the
last salutation from doubt,
& mount a dancer’s platform.
I’ve outlived silent seasons
whipped bloody & ransomed.
But let us ride the big wheel
into dawn, a naked kiss.
I say, If you wish to trouble
my persona or need to break
my bones to show me mercy,
then get on with your work
& fix me the way a Delta blues
fixes a muddy river’s night sky.
A PRAYER
Great Ooga-Booga, in your golden pavilion
beside the dung heap, please
don’t let me die in a public place.
I still see the man on the café floor
at the airport beneath a canopy
of fluorescence, somewhere
in the Midwest or back east,
travelers walking around him
& texting on cell phones
while someone shocked him back,
fiddling with dials & buttons
on a miraculous instrument.
Was the memory of a dress in his head?
Great Ooga-Booga, forgive me
for wearing out my tongue before
I said your praises. No, I haven’t
mastered the didgeridoo.
I don’t have an epic as a bribe.
My words are simple. Please
don’t let me die gazing up at a streetlight
or the Grand Central facades.
Let me go to my fishing hole
an hour before the sun sinks
into the deep woods, or swing
on the front porch, higher & higher
till I’m walking on the ceiling.
THE WORK OF ORPHEUS
He blows a ram’s horn at the first gate of the third kingdom, & one would swear it sounds like questions in the air. He walks down a troubadour’s path that comes to a halt as if his song has broken in half, standing on cobblestones that stop before tall waves below. Whatever was here is now gone, except for a percussive whisper of mail & swords. He knows the sea is a keeper of records. Gazing up at the sun, he shakes his head & walks toward a refugee camp with a sack of beans, bread, dried tomatoes, & fish, where he plays “Hallelujah” on a toy trumpet. He knows they hate a bugle blown at dawn, or the sound of taps. A sloping path toward the center of town leads him to a prison made of river stones & thatch. The faces behind bars wait for him. Does he dare to raise his reed flute to his lips this mute hour? The sun sinks like a clarion, an old war cry across windy grass or questions in the air. He goes to the rear door of the slaughterhouse & plays his Pan fife till the flies go, as the workers speak of days they drank rose water. He heads down along the creek’s muddy bank, finds a fallen tree, sits, & raises the clay flute to his lips. A magpie lands on a branch a foot away. He stops playing, whispers to his messenger, Okay, now go out there & tell them.
EMPYREAN ISLES
We have gone there, sitting here
while Herbie plays water on stone,
his piano among the misty trees.
Rainy light flows over hillocks
beside the sea, leaves, & high grass,
underneath nighttime till the Egg
glows. A place becomes the shape
of one’s mind, & secretive animals
encounter us sleepwalkers. Dawn
flows over round wooden cisterns
atop buildings as East River fog
journeys along the streets & avenues.
All the seasons crowd here at once,
& each has several minds. The boy
never leaves the middle of m
y life.
The firebirds eat clouds of insects
as black keys counter white keys,
& I beg you to sing me an old song.
I weigh love of fruit in both hands.
We’re two halves of a struck bell.
The boy’s here, his big jolly balloon
tugging me now & then off-balance.
You wake me, laughing in your sleep.
The roots are knotted underneath us.
The boy smiles, & then dares me to kiss
my left elbow. You are a double mirror
guarding me from city lights & free will,
& I’m too scared to let go of your voice
in a subkingdom of mist on the stones.
Damned if we do. Damned if we don’t.
The LP spins nightlong on repeat.
The boy has my long, girlish eyelashes.
FROM
REQUIEM
So,
when the strong unholy high winds
whiplashed over the sold-off marshlands
eaten back to a sigh of salt water,
the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings,
her floating ribs, her spleen & backbone,
left trembling in her Old World facades
& postmodern lethargy, lost to waterlogged
memories & quitclaim deeds,
exposed for all eyes, damnable
gaze, plumb line & heartthrob,
ballast & water table,
already the last ghost song
gone, no more than a drunken curse
among oak & sweet gum leaves, a tally
of broken treaties & absences echoing
cries of birds over the barrier islands
inherited by the remittance man, scalawag,
& King Cotton, & already the sky
was falling in on itself,
calling like a cloud of seagulls
gone ravenous as the Gulf
reclaiming its ebb & flowchart
while the wind banged on shutters
& unhinged doors from their frames
& unshingled the low-ridged roofs
while the arch-believers hummed
“Precious Lord” & “Deep River”
as the horsehair plaster walls
galloped along with the surge,
already folklore began to rise up
from the buried lallygag & sluice
pulsing beneath the Big Easy
rolling between & through itself,
caught in some downward tug
& turn, like a world of love affairs
backed up in a stalled inlet,
a knelt-down army of cypress,