That I did not get that process I wanted.
NEGRITUDE
They swim they play the surf for pridefulness
Their slim boards vanity you see them spread over the pages of
Life hostaged
By photographers who talk like hipsters jewish to their very noses
Infatuate beholden to that scrim of glass and light
The manufactured cataracts of defeated capitalism japanese and german
Eastman Kodak a fine and studied blindness
What will our vacation cost I mean in terms of pride
Mornings when I rise riding the long subway all the way uptown
Half asleep crossing the Columbia campus me glowing in Ferris
Booth’s high glass
I love a slim black boy. I love you
And come to work in my own inferno 300°F. covered with surfboards
Rushing everyday to make the historic effort
But after three days sweat’s no catalyst I fear my cop out’s from
Exhaustion energy’s decomposition by fahrenheitic half-lives not
arrogance
My father years ago waiting tables in the Tivoli
Won’t towel dance the customers to tips runs out screaming Crème
de menthe on rye
Carstairs alamode!
Maybe there never is another job well I’d rather be in alleys & shake
bone dice.
His wife is pregnant in the hospital San Ignaz
Yeah some of that arrogance is me: the bleak edge of the book, notes
On Function
In placid waves of plate glass or my Nikon’s eye, mornings when I rise
The spontaneous book notes what a particular girl says I love you. And
I love you
It is a thing apart from everything the people have.
DOMESTIC HORROR
The house is like the venerated tibia, a chink heirloom
Final statement of some long-nailed uncle.
Kitchen bears a constant smell of butter, huge pots of rice cover
the walls
Everywhere things frying in brittle cast-iron skillets.
She stands against the window her profile dark against parhelion
Yellow walls. Yellow walls to drift out of the city like ordinary
clouds made to
Destroy the confines of the room. 14 × 11, designed by a russian cubist.
The walls float high above New York harbor, this house I keep telling you
It’s just too damn near the airport. Pan Am hanger in the living room,
a browntoned
Photograph taxis past all day, coldeyed 1920ish khanyapa,
Great floppy beige hat and rimless spectacles: that same young woman
of the
Kitchen dressed in a pale, wiser former body. All day they talk, the
lady on the wall
Giving directions: “More flour in that gravy, O my daughter.”
Look! Out on the wild streets of the afternoon a palsied mother and
father in slow
Motion. Galloping home, their well-formed daughter all blond curls
clinging
To the father’s drunken, twisted back. But they’re too ugly for a
poem of this quality.
Wait, who is this dead child bounding through our home, devouring
the furniture?
TOIL
I has taken all that I can stand
And now it is heroism
Someone to tell you my story
The NEWS photographers crowd
Across the lonely Hudson pier
Shouting interviews,
Ta ta. I’m going to swim to Greece
Who am I trying to impress
You burst into tears late!
My lips gargle “Goodbye”
The rosy sunrise envelops me,
My arm hooks into the night
EMBARKATION FOR CYTHERA
And out of the solitude
Voice and soul with selves unite
—C. Okigbo
This color, its pure absence
in other words a space
some African mothers, children
cupped in their slim arms
They are bending into the sand
and it is their lesson written there.
A new motif of
Destruction—
The idea of a written language
when before,
the words in our
mouths were enough.
Not that it takes anything away
from the people we are,
“Education”
You don’t write “corn” if you
mean okra.
Along Merrick Blvd, standing in front
the dance hall
it’s the same thing, the
cop in a luminous blue
His badge spreads all over his face,
threatening me. There should be
someway to get in without paying.
Rain that falls into the dusty
life of the people on
the street, it turns into a new language
All the fine mommas walking inside,
getting out of Grand Prixs
Can hardly read
this paper without stumbling over “embarkation”
What