All the Merry Hills

  Say there is another story we will not share here, let us assume this to be true.

  Say at a later time, there is a We to be engaged, one in which you and I fit in that tight a space with minimal panic.

  You could say something about the weather and I could make a remark on how pleasant the bells peel every other hour flooding the trees with their trembling.

  Say you could be still upon noticing you were becoming undone, as though you were the bridal lace on the big day. You are neither the bride nor the groom, but you are up there with the cool of them. Say you were one of the multitudes around us: you, too, rooted in the wealth of your pronouncements.

  Once, in the dark, I mistook a hanging hose for a broken noose. In the silence of all that is good between us, I could not provoke inquiries. The mountains were full of song, their trembling not our enemy.

  In the Name of the Tongue

  Come Sunday afternoon and I sat back hunched

  in the car, thumbing my father’s Bible, the door slamming

  behind him, as though his gun had burst a nest of birds.

  I fingered the grime farther into my hair and sat rehearsing,

  Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,

  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house,

  my father’s sweet-tongued weights turning coolly on my tongue

  as I thought again of that verse where the woman

  wets Jesus’ feet with her tears and mops them away with her hair,

  the lean, long day sliding past, hot in the nest of my jaw.

  It was always the same house we stopped at, Baba and I,

  the one whose eaves hung low like the milkman’s sly eyes

  when they followed Patience Wida’s behind

  and made him clang his bell more slowly.

  How afterward Mami’s anger rose when she caught

  the jasmine and talc tight on his neck

  like a noose. Something must have burst holy out of her

  those nights, all night her tongue flailing,

  fire coming down through the walls louder

  than when they made love, and he whimpered afterward.

  How I reached into the darkness and tongued

  the contours of his sins.

  Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,

  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.

  It was a sport I knew little of then

  except for the beads in the corners of his eyes

  when he returned delicate with his thunders.

  He liked golf best, and always took me to the driving range

  afterward, his hand in a glove, holding firm his stick.

  Tomorrow, he said, you will learn how to drive.

  In the Name of the Father

  after Espada

  My father sat in the back pew nursing his doubts.

  All he had left was his totem. The names of his clan

  turned on his tongue until the incense died down.

  Afterward he walked for hours in the dark

  fine-tuning his hearing aid, hoping to hear God.

  He exceled in the dark like a root.

  The glow that shed off him tangled good women,

  sweet music, and tar.

  The night she left him he said, The dead

  have no shadows, then waited for his luck to turn

  in the keyhole the way the heart

  turns slovenly with remorse.

  At night he slung her dress across his thigh

  and mended the holes in the armpits.

  He turned the names of his fears over and over

  in his mouth, like a morsel of meat one chews for the salt

  but won’t swallow until the tongue scars.

  Wars, he said, have been ended this way; you stitch

  your way right across the stains.

  The year he learned to type, he crouched in the dust

  and sketched with his fingers the house

  he would build when she came back to him begging.

  The words he practiced made his mouth twitch.

  Sometimes I catch him in the taste of my tongue.

  Holy Ghost

  It all begins with the stain of him, the marrow

  leaking out into the bone. We are driving through the dark

  without headlights when Norma mentions the ghost

  I have all along nursed in my blood, how only after forgetting

  her Bible in her preacher father’s car did she find the girl in whose

  jawline and slow eyes her father too resided. He must

  have slipped the photo of the girl in the book

  of Exodus while preparing a sermon on idolatry,

  the dull-eyed girl lanky beside him in the picture,

  astute in her Catholic school uniform

  and every bit the maid Norma’s mother had fired years ago

  for more than missing laundry. We drove for hours

  in silence afterward through the rain,

  the hailstorm beating alive within me,

  Confess, confess, confess. How I could have wept

  the tears arresting my burdened tongue.

  Catechism

  April 1994

  You must have known better. Twelve years old and you were in the perfect blur of the world, the nuns like fire ants crawling everywhere, worried sick out of their habits and pantyhose. Particularly Sister Bettina.

  Sister Bettina and her breasts, the daft youth in her knowing eye, and how the catechism class numbers kept climbing up over them, as though they were the very fountain of youth lit with the very song from the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s wet dream, the one in which the children return to him, their nimble mothers in tow.

  Because who didn’t want to be saved by her, be confirmed in the flesh of her low hips, learn how to receive the body of Christ with a throbbing jaw, an anarchy of gears shifting between your adolescent thighs as her lower lip curled, pleading for the mercy of her open tongue saying, The Body of Christ; the Body of Christ, Amen.

  Because that must have been when I saw the light of my bearings and yet was left longing for it to cut me through to blindness. My eyes shied away, the quiet limbs on the convent’s screen washing in the foam of the stream. The thwarted hack of an axe through brawn, a brow wet with the effort of it. And then they were coming, bodies tumbling down the stream like manna from heaven.

  Remind me again, dear love, of that time when the world was as young as we were and I was lit bright with urges, light as the shroud Christ yielded when he gave up his tomb, sick of sleeping alone and dreading the eternity of it, when he sought himself some company. Of this no poetry shall come.

  Ota Benga Returns to the Congo

  I

  Once, after he was drunk, my father blurted out,

  Was Ota Benga the first Afropolitan—

  Negritude encountered after its own hangover?

  then leaned into his sleep soon as C parted his lips,

  the storm clouds quietening within him like an orangutan’s.

  II

  All the way we go. The night we dig up Ota Benga’s remains

  we are neck deep in the muck, heads above ground

  on grass. Our fingers, C said, carried most silence in the dark.

  I believed no word of it. The grave smelled most of wood smoke and funk,

  the piranhas in Benga’s mouth pearl white and everywhere.

  III

  Here is what the paper said of him that September:

  Good head, bright eyes, a pleasing countenance.

  He is not hairy, is not covered by the downy fell

  described by some explorers. Happiest when at work.

  IV

  I remember nothing of what riled the orangutan

  inside the cage deep inside my father, the one

  he concealed so long and deep in him like a bad habit

  until it too raged for its freedom, and my father placed his pistol

  on De Boer’s ear. I too sometimes hear its rolling call in my bones.

  V

  Said the reverend once again alive

  with frustration: Our race, we think,

  is depressed enough without exhibiting

  one of us with the apes.

  VI

  The secretary of the zoo at the time

  was a eugenicist, Madison Grant. His writings

  on the dangers of inferior races outbreeding

  and mixed breeding with Caucasians

  earned him bowed heads and Europraises.

  VII

  Look, I said, I know nothing about this, not anymore

  than you do. I too wish I could dance myself free.

  I have the feeling I’ve lived in the empire of the zoo

  before. I too have shouldered a fondness for orangutans.

  VIII

  Dear Bingo. I am not the music the arrow leaves behind

  with the bow when it leaps off to find flesh on its own.

  Once sober, my father said, If you stare long enough

  at the horizon you will catch the last slave ship ploughing

  its way back to Africa with our kin. I screwed my eyes

  on the horizon until they burned with the blood.

  IX

  I wanted to touch the joy my father carried with him

  after the police had accepted his bribe for driving

  under the influence. In the backseat on the highway

  back to The Motherland, Ota Benga assembles himself

  bone against bone, eyes blind and eager like a newborn’s.

  Only then do I see everything said about the horizon is true.

  X

  Once in the dark I awoke on a fresh grave

  in the middle of a cane field, the fur in my mouth

  wet with blood. Aching for insight, I chipped

  and chipped at my teeth until my blood filled with song.

  Aching for insight, I chipped and chipped at my teeth

  but the gunshot sound would not leave me.

  XI

  That afternoon the clouds swirled inside my father.

  Half man, half anger, the no-man’s-land in him

  proclaimed away from the middle ground and announced

  the missing link in the zoo. I chipped and chipped at my teeth

  until my blood filled with song.

  XII

  One with a tongue armed with the armor

  of obvious things says in the newspaper: We send

  our missionaries to Africa to Christianize them

  then we bring one here to brutalize him.

  XIII

  My report will not teach the Academy anything basically new.

  The first thing I learned was to shake hands, I will say.

  Every wanderer on earth feels a little tickling in his heels.

  Every wanderer on earth feels a little tickling in his heels.

  XIV

  After the reverend is once again alive

  with frustration, he announces, We are frank

  enough to say we don’t like this exhibition

  of one of our own race with monkeys.

  XV

  Miles afterward C startles awake, the world still young

  as him whizzing past his window. The dream

  in his eyes still carries flowers of his goodness. We are

  miles away still from the Motherland, but already

  the horizon is alive with the wagging tongues of ceremonial fires.

  XVI

  I never carried an orangutan as big as the one

  my father kept barricaded deep inside him

  behind the parting in his hair and good diction

  searching for a way out. Avoidance of all willfulness

  was the supreme commandment he imposed on himself,

  until he heard the gunshot leap from his hand.

  XVII

  O where are you Saartjie Baartman

  you whose roots leaked the seed of their blood

  into me. I want to worship before the altar

  of your symbolism, the altar whose behind

  White men stained with longing.

  XVIII

  Afterward, I lifted my hands and took no pleasure

  in lifting the sky. After everything had freed him,

  my father still believed geography of origin remained

  our indictment. For years I too would not heed his call.

  I chipped at my teeth but my blood would not fill with song.

  XIX

  Before the credits climb up the screen

  closing the film on his life, Ota Benga

  in the stadium at Matadi rises from his seat

  and surveys the floodlights undressing

  the audience aching for him to speak.

  XX

  Dear Gentlemen of the Academy: I wish

  I was not the music the bow offers the mouth

  the arrow leaps out to touch

  saying, I am a man, I am a man, I am a man!

  //

  You Don’t Want the Light to Find Out What You’ve Done

  You, me, and Martin Luther King Jr. being black together. We are on a highway, somewhere where the corn is low, holding its ears in. As if the Indian bones in these hills had something to say. You tell me it’s Nebraska. That corn looks Nebraskan is your excuse. The way my girl could be Persian when the weather permits.

  We have given speeches for free before, but not since Iowa. Iowa has been our dessert. We are off now west on the gravy train, our lungs beating virginal across the open states. Where did they lynch men like me for gazing too long at white women?

  Everywhere. In Illinois they hung two men near the Blue Front. And not until 1942 was a man tried for holding another man captive. For labor. That was the nearly true end of slavery. But still I am waiting for a morsel of good faith at the courts of public opinion on the redemption of Iron Mike Tyson. Waiting for my fist to clear the foggy eye of God. The way VD shots calm down the particulars, keep the herpes away, watching by the rubble.

  And I too used to think these tollgates here were border posts up in arms, uniting the states. And this country here was one huge jukebox. It explained the slotting in of coins, quarters tumbling down in a jig, sly. Money is deep as skin, knows no enemies like water. Watch me love you a lungful, coming through.

  Somewhere near here a young man was killed, picked in a bar and nailed to a fence. Beat all night like a tattered flag, kept the crows away. He too remained resolute on the stakes of the law.

  I was not one among that number who called the king wacko, but in that matter too I harbor my shame. Once in a while I doubted his marbles. What with the blanket and naming, what with all that and the other.

  I am still wondering about being black enough. The way light sisters wonder if sunscreen remains appropriate for black girls in summer.

  And if at all collard greens remain self-affirming.

  I am in want of my egg over easy, my sunny-side up. I am still searching for a room dark enough to hang my skin in, let the light come in.

  Diallo

  I

  This was before the sound of the crow, before Cato had confessed

  that his life had come to nothing, because the man who ran in his blood,

  buried an ocean away, had disowned him for loving a white woman.

  Faith, like all stubborn things, lies in things seen. This was before

  the color had drained from his American dream.

  II

  At the trial, friends and family of the officers will sit on one side

  of the courtroom, Diallo’s parents and supporters on the other,

  a scarf of blood between them, spelling the names inscribed

  on our crucifix of skin. This is an old tale,

  for motion there must be light, for light, shadow.

  III

  I am not above speaking of trees. Because I am not above speaking

  of trees, I will make no condemnation of the forest. I am setting

  out to tell you a simple tale, the one with the sound

  of Cato hoisting mattresses up the staircase to his American dream,

  the wood beneath his boots mournful, as though it knew

  the stars in our return. I want to be someone, Cato said, almost with belief.

  IV

  Here is a scene, Diallo studying by night, his stoic hopes

  in a mound beside him, noosed by the chains that sunk

  the names of his ancestors in the crossing. Because I am

  sentimental he will study by candlelight. Because reason

  will prevail, he will study the wisdom of the crow.

  This of course is a lie.

  V

  Because I am intemperate I must infuse the stage with scent.

 

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