////

  Preamble to In the Case Regarding My Brother

  Of this I needed no proof. My brother was the ape inside me, I could tell. It had taken him years to gestate. He turned and turned within me with all the will of vertigo. I could tell the eye of his gusts, but I stood tall. My brother took root.

  He had no date set for his birth, and he set none—not that I can recall. My brother grew slowly within me like a root. I lugged to him all my doubts and nursed him. What else could I do, everything knew its way around everything else. But he spared me no effort. He was my brother.

  Requiem: In the Case Regarding My Brother

  I

  Through me ran the river. Through me ran the river hollowed out by goodness, a thicket of skulls, jaws intact, the countenance in their faces still grimacing the face of death.

  Halos quivered feverishly above the black waters, waiting.

  I mentioned nothing of the exertions between my brother and me, our losses stood prodigal.

  II

  My brother blamed everything on everything else. Wounded by goodness he kept now only the counsel of himself.

  Unable to hear him, I said, sounding like a nut, Being is becoming.

  I could not dismiss him.

  He believed there was more to facts than pedestrian somnambulism. But I could hear only the thrashing of hail on the face of the river. I could hear the sound gather within my brother and consume him.

  III

  Once I caught a bough leaping into the air, a thicket of birds lifting off of it, dissolving among the stars.

  Bridgehead, mast, a lungful of god.

  I watched my brother wade deeper into the waters, his shoulders arched like a bow.

  IV

  Because the river ran through me, I was flooded with its longing. I wanted near me only blood, I said.

  I wanted near me only blood that had known the wrath of empire.

  But all I could hear was the wrath of black hail beating through my brother. I stilled myself and listened.

  V

  My brother contended all waves carried tension.

  Alone at night he heard our skinfolk tug out of the water. The hymns in their feet, he said, carried no sheet music.

  Wing after wing lifting from each bough.

  VI

  Beyond the banks of the river lay the tortured mountains.

  Because the mountains were stoic, I could not bruise them with bitterness.

  Because the heavens were named in darkness, I could not claim them as my own.

  VII

  My brother said something was tightening within him. He was looking, he said, for more space to move within his skin.

  I worried with understanding. It was a hunger I knew could not be diminished. Colossal in its cravings, unimpeachable with its facts.

  The sculpture he was building fashioned a cage around him. On its roof, drawn out bales of cotton, a thicket of nooses dangling like neckties.

  The leg irons, he said, were the only symbolism.

  VIII

  Because belief too is an act of faith, I believed the wound in my brother would liberate him to the music within him.

  Standing together I believed I could feel the seams where within him earth met sky, where the blood in our marrow revealed the horned truth of our conception.

  But my brother heaved full of pleading; everything was taut within him, the torment busy, arching his shoulders.

  I waited for him farther along; he was my brother.

  IX

  I want to forgive you for not knowing what I am speaking of.

  Once, in a single seating, I watched him with his bare hands fashion a chisel out of a rock.

  Against his chest, the thrashing of birds lifting from the boughs within him, the chaos that hung in the air like a cape before their squawking began.

  X

  There was no harm in my brother. He stood for what he stood; did what before him waited to be done. I believe his beliefs lacked the extravagance of his faith. The beams above his head, lean long torsos, bough upon bough full of harmonious song.

  XI

  Because the mountains were stoic, I could not bruise them with bitterness.

  Because the heavens were named with darkness, I could not claim them as my own.

  Oak, pine, chestnut, and song.

  I could hear the muted songs balled like fists in the chests of the mountains.

  I watched my brother wade deeper into the waters, the skulls bobbing on either side of him. The slick light made my brother glow, the hailstones about him shining quietly, melting into the moonlight.

  XII

  We laid out the yokes alongside each other on the banks of the river.

  I want to believe I must have made a remark about nothing trivial, but the lugging would not tire him, the river would not concede.

  XIII

  I want to say I was filled only with the longings of the river. But I could not resist that which had claimed me. I had been named by their patience.

  I would like to say I abhorred their invitations; that I found little to no appeal in their seductions.

  The beams above his head resembled the frustrated arms of scarecrows. I turned pleadingly to my brother, but all I could muster was the blood beating into my mouth.

  XIV

  Unable to locate a fragrance, he rubbed dry sage to a fish head and carved a window into a wall. He believed if it faced the forest we could gather with our eyes what the forest remembered.

  I could not disprove him. He believed warmth was a creed all living things abided by.

  The hunger within him worried me with song.

  XV

  After the long hours he said, The night remained unrepentant. Then he dragged all the yokes back to the waters and laid them in a coffle.

  Each skull remembered its name, the patient weight of its yoke.

  Because the river remembered, my brother would not forget.

  XVI

  Once, in the moonlight, I caught a noose in the river melting into a halo.

  Wise caller, maladies serene in the morning light.

  The beams he dealt with remembered pale skin and bruises.

  He understood only that which was before him, what the moon could name of itself between clouds, the song in the morning dew. Because the river remembered, my brother would not forget.

  XVII

  A creed he lived by: nothing with horns could be wrapped for too long.

  Two things he knew of the heavens:

  1) No light so assertive could reveal them with honesty.

  2) That which we all knew of the heavens, which cannot be unnamed.

  XVIII

  I want to forgive you for not knowing what I am speaking of.

  I want to forgive you for the free song my brother strangled in the cave of his mouth. I want to forgive you for the song my brother strangled inside of him after his exertions.

  I cannot say with confidence that my brother lacked belief. I cannot attest that in the end, he was without bitterness. Like all things good my brother’s song underlined only preambles.

  XIX

  I wanted so much to believe there was more to everything than the embers of things. I wanted to believe only music could name the honest symbolism regarding my brother. There was nothing sinister in him.

  Wise caller, bridgehead, anchor full of dust.

  XX

  My brother contended all waves carried tension. Against every beach he contended he heard footsteps hulk out of the waters. There was nothing sinister about it, he said, no one was skulking.

  In the end there was nothing left of my brother after his exertions. But what is good is good. In his sleep my brother let the choruses lift out of him, they seeped out of his mouth through a crook of his lips.

  I cocked my ears and listened.

  He said nothing of his illuminations. I could not dismiss him. He was my brother.

  ////

  Mugarandega

  1. Natsa kwaunobva kwaunoenda husiku

  Alone, in a foreign land, she picked out each morning avocados to shampoo her hair. Only the ripe ones, like luck knew when to exercise their grace, the ground beneath them sleeved moist with dew. Luck, she said, was all eyes and patient quivering. Wounded with strangeness, she married a man with sweet flora for a tongue. His height, she believed, revealed the aloe in him, his furrowed clouds the rage of flame lilies. The year of the Federation of Nyasaland and Rhodesia, she said, bad mushroom had saved us from the Portuguese, the mosquito Dahomey. Still, in the wet season, I dream of the soft pit in her flesh, the quiver of her hand in the dew.

  *

  2. Manakira kure mvura yemubvumbi

  We sat in the night under the trees watching the river and its fortitude, drawn out and taut, anxious as catapults. When an arrow desires it most, it leaps alone off the bow to find the flesh on its own. In the dark, his body quivered magical with nerves, the spell of the river fetching him. In my mouth, beneath my tongue, the unnamed pits of my fears. The water, we knew, fed its own beasts. Across it, he said, spread the rest of our lives—the plush dreams we had offered the women we were to marry, the soft cheeks of our future children fat with good health, shade we were to scurry beneath. In my blood beat the woman who fashioned a soup from boiling stones. In my blood beat the woman wounded with strangeness. When an arrow desires flesh most, it leaps alone off the bow. Night sky ricocheting off the water. In their eyes the beasts carried loud stars and satellites, the hollow seat of the chariot in the moon’s blind eye awaiting us on the other side.

  *

  3. Akanga nyimo avangarara

  You never know when something truly begins. Where the men ponder a fire on a winter’s night, a boy carries a pouch, rises to be a satellite elsewhere. Still after all these years, you remain attracted to graveyards. The sight of tombstones stitching their way across the train’s passing window quilts you in silence. Once, in a foreign land, you muttered confusedly, Breath is a syllable cremation cannot afford, then alighted the train to hug the first African you saw, because they were African. The scent of his sweat, raw shea butter, sage, and cinnamon. His glow carried you back up the mountains. Flame lilies and lavender, aloe and rose. Still after all you wish to be buried among your kin. You fear the weight of return the way you fear in death the earth pressing down against your corpse will snap your clavicle into two. It will be a fiasco among the sleeping dead, the commotion lateral and carrying on for days. With neither wife nor a child, they will bury you with a mouse. Remember still, dear stranger, stranger shores before you breached more reluctant waters, the ground beneath them pitted, still moist with the dew.

  *

  In the Throat of the Heaven’s Guide

  And should the revolution take place between your thighs, brother leader, blame hallucinogenics; it is only the mothers of the brave who weep, and my blood is weak with forgetting; how it trembles.

  They will peel him out of a hole like Hussein. Or a mansion in Abbottabad. There is air and non-air. My friend tells me the colonel prefers tents, and face cream, things with meaning.

  Perhaps they will find him in a French boutique in Tunis, lipsticked and getting his hair done like the sisters up in Harlem, air conditioning across summer.

  Still, mother, I do not believe in the music of oceans; too many of my bones want to return home. The beating of my blood, Angola.

  And should the revolution take place between your thighs, brother leader, pick the itch: there is no honor in clenched teeth. There is air and non-air.

  My friend tells me that after the urethra’s slow hymn and the gunmetal blues of other genitalia, eventually the syphilis climbs upriver to claim the mind. Still there is no truer love.

  What blues jig seizes these feet; what wailing in flight like glorious comets.

  And should the revolution take place between your thighs, brother leader, execute a strategic retreat. What saves us but the wind through the eye. Burn, Bab al-Azizia, burn.

  He will be in his desert library taking a nap in a womb chair between Nietzsche and Gogol, eyes behind shades. There is air and non-air.

  My friend tells me he has a sweet tooth for agbada and Gabbana. They will find him in a mall flowing in the rivers of his robes. He will want penicillin and a pack of Doritos.

  Still, I often wonder about Sani Abacha, the Viagra, and whether the Indian women knew of Mobutu and the hemorrhoid; the scent of hours the sheik burnt watching himself, pitch-perfecting.

  Always I am a slave, half-ape, half-child. What saves us but the wind through the eye.

  Born of the gun. Give me sight, so I too may see. An eye for an eye, our scrambled world.

  Acknowledgments

  The following poems have previously appeared in the following publications:

  Cincinnati Review: “The City,” “As a Moonflower Curious of the Night”

  Copper Nickel: “In the Throat of the Heaven’s Guide,” “You Don’t Want the Light to Find Out What You’ve Done,” “Catechism”

  The Journal: “It Came to Pass,” “Farther Inland”

  Laurel Review: “A Town on the Frontier,” “The Cunning”

  Pleiades: “A Hunger,” “Far Country”

  Plume: “My Dear Menshevik,” “Feasts for the Blind”

  Prairie Schooner: “In the Name of the Tongue,” “The Last Time I Saw Annamore Tsonga”

  I want to thank the editors and staff of these publications for their generosity.

  “Diallo” is informed by the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant from Guinea, West Africa, shot and killed by four NYPD officers in New York City, February 4, 1999. The first two lines in part ii are taken directly from an article published in the New York Times during the trial.

  In “Ota Benga Returns to the Congo,” the lines “the secretary of the zoo at the time . . . Caucasians” are taken from rt.com, which carries an article on this case. The words of Reverend James H. Gordon (“Our race, we think, / is depressed enough without exhibiting / one of us with the apes”) are directly quoted from the New York Times, September 11, 1906. “Every wanderer feels a little tickling in his heels,” “The first thing I learned was to shake hands,” and “My report will not teach the Academy anything basically new” are from “A Report to the Academy” by Franz Kafka.

  “In the Throat of the Heaven’s Guide” alludes to and employs refrains that echo both Gil Scott-Heron’s and Sarah Jones’s works, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Your Revolution” respectively.

  Note

  Mugarandega

  Mugarandega loosely translates to mean a “loneliness borne out of migration.” Each of the parts in this poem is opened by a Shona proverb. Natsa kwaunobva kwaunoenda husiku loosely translates as “leave your place of departure in good books as you do not know how you will be received where you are going.” Manakira kure mvura yemubvumbi loosely translates to “things only look good from a distance”; Akanga nyimo avangarara loosely means “them who have chosen to roast round nuts must stay the course.”

  About Bernard Farai Matambo

  Bernard Farai Matambo is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College. His prose and poetry have appeared in several publications, including Copper Nickel, New Orleans Review, Ohioana Quarterly, Pleiades, and Plume.

  In the African Poetry Book Series

  After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems

  Ama Ata Aidoo

  Edited and with a foreword by Helen Yitah

  The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964–2013

  Kofi Awoonor

  Edited and with an introduction by Kofi Anyidoho

  The January Children

  Safia Elhillo

  Madman at Kilifi

  Clifton Gachagua

  Think of Lampedusa

  Josué Guébo

  Translated by Todd Fredson

  Introduction by John Keene

  Beating the Graves

  Tsitsi Ella Jaji

  Stray

  Bernard Farai Matambo

  Gabriel Okara: Collected Poems

  Gabriel Okara

  Edited and with an introduction by Brenda Marie Osbey

  The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony

  Ladan Osman

  Fuchsia

  Mahtem Shiferraw

  In a Language That You Know

  Len Verwey

  Logotherapy

  Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  When the Wanderers Come Home

  Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

  Seven New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set

  Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

  (Slapering Hol)

  Eight New-Generation African Poets:A Chapbook Box Set

  Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

 

1 2 3 4 5