Index of Titles and First Lines 437
New Poems
Providence
I walked away with your face
stolen from a crowded room,
& the sting of requited memory
lived beneath my skin. A name
raw on my tongue, in my brain, a glimpse
nestled years later like a red bird
among wet leaves on a dull day.
A face. The tilt of a head. Dark
lipstick. Aletheia. The unknown
marked on a shoulder, night
weather in our heads.
I pushed out of this half-stunned
yes, begging light, beyond the caul’s
shadow, dangling the lifeline of Oh.
I took seven roads to get here
& almost died three times.
How many near misses before
new days slouched into the left corner
pocket, before the hanging fruit
made me kneel? I crossed
five times in the blood to see
the plots against the future—
descendent of a house that knows
all my strong & weak points.
No bounty of love apples glistened
with sweat, a pear-shaped lute
plucked in the valley of the tuber rose
& Madonna lily. Your name untied
every knot in my body, a honey-eating
animal reflected in shop windows
& twinned against this underworld.
Out of tide-lull & upwash
a perfect hunger slipped in
tooled by an eye, & this morning
makes us the oldest song in any god’s throat.
We had gone back walking
on our hands. Opened by a kiss,
by fingertips on the Abyssinian
stem & nape, we bloomed
from underneath stone. Moon-pulled
fish skirted the gangplank,
a dung-scented ark of gopherwood.
Now, you are on my skin, in my mouth
& hair as if you were always
woven in my walk, a rib
unearthed like a necklace of sand dollars
out of black hush. You are a call
& response going back to the first
praise-lament, the old wish
made flesh. The two of us
a third voice, an incantation
sweet-talked & grunted out of The Hawk’s
midnight horn. I have you inside
a hard question, & it won’t let go,
hooked through the gills & strung up
to the western horizon. We are one,
burning with belief till the thing
inside the cage whimpers
& everything crazes out to a flash
of silver. Begged into the fat juice
of promises, our embrace is a naked
wing lifting us into premonition
worked down to a sigh & plea.
Water
If only I could cleave myself from the water table
below this two-step, from this opaque moan
& tremble that urge each bright shoot up,
this pull of the sea on fish under a pregnant
moon. I sweat to buy water. It breaks
into a dirge polishing stone. The oathtaker
who isn’t in hock to salt merchants & trinket kings,
says, Drink more water, Mister Bones.
The taste of azure. To rinse bile from the bony cup
of regret, to trouble rivers till the touch of gold
Columbus & his men killed the Arawak for
floats up to ravenous light, to flush out every tinge
of pity & gall—each of us a compass star
& taproot down to what we are made of.
Jasmine
I sit beside two women, kitty-corner
to the stage, as Elvin’s sticks blur
the club into a blue fantasia.
I thought my body had forgotten the Deep
South, how I’d cross the street
if a woman like these two walked
towards me, as if a cat traversed
my path beneath the evening star.
Which one is wearing jasmine?
If my grandmothers saw me now
they’d say, Boy, the devil never sleeps.
My mind is lost among November
cotton flowers, a soft rain on my face
as Richard Davis plucks the fat notes
of chance on his upright
leaning into the future.
The blonde, the brunette—
which one is scented with jasmine?
I can hear Duke in the right hand
& Basie in the left
as the young piano player
nudges us into the past.
The trumpet’s almost kissed
by enough pain. Give him a few more years,
a few more ghosts to embrace—Clifford’s
shadow on the edge of the stage.
The