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Flay
The point of a pen opens a hole into a soul’s dereliction. This search
for the right word bores through stone.
Sunlight takes no measure of what is clung to.
That way a man can place the half-dome of a tomato, slice into flesh
and cut an island of loss. Migrant,
punished by spice and the scent of cooking,
you wake up on a cold day in another country and put your faith in hot rice and braised goat,
and the persistent aftertaste of a lost home.
Gospels are made of less than this.
But outside it is morning. A summer breeze burns down to the water and the ocean begins.
Nostalgia
A train travels through an endless Midwestern cornfield,
yellow slants to gold as the sun leans heavy on the horizon;
this meager harvest of memory and hope -
the entropy of a coffee cup half spilling into
a wash of half-truths. A sweet decline.
To have spent one's life thinking, I am the good one,
the stable one, then one morning in a city between the city you call home
and the one you are traveling to, you accept:
you are migrant. This is where you find yourself,
somewhere between coercion and insubstantial desire, the slow decomposition that is life. Yet for now
this half-light, the gentle sway of the tracks:
music enough for this journey.
Quest
When the doctor said terminal,
you went silent, and I set off, brother. Journey is a word trembling at a platform’s edge.
Traveling as a way of emptying out all that cannot be emptied. Only to arrive back at myself twice as full but with a shovel,
blade worn to nub from the digging.
There will be a reckoning, but I promise to walk with you as far as I can in this fragile light buoyant with loss.
Sojourn
The train bores through corn like a weevil.
Birds hop across drooping leaves like scribes.
An immigrant, I try to read origin here but cannot.
Mighty nations erased in all but place-names,
reduced to fit the small malice of a conqueror’s heart.
What will not yield to the poet’s gaze will be overwritten,
as well. Sure as ink rides the sway of paper.
But there, in a tear in the green and yellow,
a red tractor idles like a slow burning coal.
And speaking of fire, that man burning on TV,
skin melting, somewhere between Africa and Lampedusa.
Flaming in the prow of a boat.
You turn from the image, say: death will find you how it wills, and as it wills. The chemo in you is
fire too. And in the end,
in someone’s heart, we too must burn.
Cameo: Broach
Outside, snow travels in unhurried drifts.
Inside the overheated train, fog shrouds the dirty window, drawing mottled patterns.
A second landscape of impermanence and breath.
With a finger, I trace a cameo, not unlike the broaches mother wore high on the neck.
You were always her favorite. The best of us.
How to broach influence? How to speak of us without speaking of father and mother?
A swathe of light falls across the tray table,
an ant trembles under the weight of the bright.
I fold an origami bird, think of hand-rolled cigarettes, made from Bible pages,
suddenly given flight by flame, egrets immolated in the burn.
Question
What a short rope the larynx is,
the hanged man, sacrifice as sin.
And how many hung from trees for redemption, for clarity, for fear?
What is this insatiable murder of trees?
In Atlanta I read under a Mamie poster.
And later a white man asked me why there was so much violence in my novel.
And I was unsure whether he meant:
I’m sorry for all the violence we have done to you.
Outside my B&B room, an old oak where,
the white owner told me with no irony,
black bodies were hung from.
But I too stand on the path of privilege.
Why as an African haven’t I asked,
how many people my people put on the road to enslavement?
A Small Awe
The afternoon feels like a vast distance,
a sky heavy with rain clouds.
The day is like a flicker screen and what it illumines slips quickly to shadow.
How age diminishes childhood to a fading stain on a table cloth; okra stew from a lunch served by the constrained heart of a mother longing for more.
How Giacometti’s tortured bodies carry a redemption,
always alluding to the Christ on the Cross, perhaps.
Or maybe just the simple unadorned body of pain marking a human crossing the desert of life.
Reason always ends at the edge of water –
Ocean, Lake, River, even a pond.
The world we carry inside follows us everywhere.
Our imagined home remains nostalgia; shiver,
ache, loss, and also a flutter of release.
How pigeons lift in a cloud of frenzy then settle back to the duty of crumbs.
Ritual is Journey
And suddenly it’s raining, streaking train windows.
And light becomes a bird, a particular flutter.
What shadows let slip, tattoo patterns on skin,
repairs with needle and ink,
and the whisper of lineage.
To be a man, to be black, to be a black man,
is a dangerous journey. My heart is a knot burling a staff, wisdom won blow by blow.
Father, I say, father.
Mercy. Come Mercy, come.
Brother, we share genes so old
England was still black, and Africa was the only present tense in the world.
As we unzip tracks in flashes of light,
I seek an impossible dream.
Yet all rivers flow to the ocean.
All the doors white men closed in my father's face,
cannot compare to the void,
in which my mother found no door.
Mercy. Come mercy, come.
This is no lament; women deserve our awe.
In Africa we say, he who strikes a woman strikes stone.
If women called out from all their loss and in all their power, blood would drown everything.
And does that first black woman regret letting us live?
Still, ritual is journey, atonement is real.
As you lay dying, I asked, what is your biggest regret?
Every kindness withheld, you said.
Every flicker of pleasure denied, you said.
Look, you said, sunlight.
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