The Best American Poetry 2014 (13 page)

I have also been left singing “Careless Love”

 but my negritude is nobody's coonskin cap

 on a mountaintop or down by the riverside.

My negritude has sucked all the joy juice

 from the days of wild virginal forests

 I made to kneel with axe & crosscut.

My negritude has beaten tom-toms

 till the drawstring of doubt unraveled

 & blood leaked on my blue suede shoes.

My negritude came a long ways to find me

 in Louisiana beside beckoning quicksand,

 a disappearing act & the double limbo.

My negritude is the caul worked into soil

 brought back to life by cosmic desire

 & gratitude baked into my daily bread.

My negritude sways before a viper's

 truth serum on an iron spearhead,

 belladonna tucked behind my left ear.

From afar, Cesaire, your wit & fidelity

 made me stumble-dance a half mile

 here, beyond any puppet's hallelujah,

while Grandmama sat in a wheelchair

 among the tangled rows of collards,

 okra, speckled peas, & sweet corn,

digging with a hoe honed so many years

 the blade was a quarter moon—all the

 strength she had in her twisted body.

Now, even if this is a sign of my negritude,

 I still remember a rain-drenched sun

 rising out of the loony old scrub oaks.

Sure, I know the tiger neither speaks

 of her tigritude nor the blood she's left

 on grass & wildflowers around the tombs.

from
Gris-Gris

In my last past life I had a nut brown wife,

a gray and white house looking over the sea,

a forest for love and a river for grief,

a lantern for hope, for courage a knife,

a city for distance, lights spread on the sea.

In my last past life I had a brown wife

subtle and busy and contented and brief,

(she stood in the dusk silhouette with the sea)

a forest and love and a river, and grief

was a ghost hidden green in the leaves,

an echo off cliffs that bound back the sea.

In that life it would last, my past and my wife,

the wren in the garden, the moon on the roof,

the day winds that flirted and teased at the sea,

the forest that loved and the river that grieved

the life that was garden and day wind and thief

(each sunrise and sundown the turn of the sea)

the life that I had, and my last brown wife,

a forest for love, a still river for grief.

from
Southwest Review

The idea turned out to be no more than a cart wheel

Stuck in mud, & unturned fields spreading to the horizon while

Two guys in a tavern went on drinking
tsuica
& recalling their one

Accomplishment in life—the seduction of a virgin on the blank

Pedestal of a statue where Stalin had once stood.

The State is an old man's withered arm.

        ~

The only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx.

You can tell by the last letter of his name,

Which has the shape & frail balance of an overturned cross

On a windswept hillside. It marked the end of things.

Of lumber that rots & falls. The czar is a shattered teacup,

The trouble with a good idea is that it has to work:

The only surviving son of Jesus Christ survives now

Mostly in English departments & untended graves.

One thing he said I still remember, a thing that's never there

When I try to look it up, was: “Sex should be no more important . . .

Than a glass of water.” It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing

Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.

The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him

Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became

A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves.

        ~

My colleague Otto Fick, who twenty years ago

Wrote brilliant lectures on the air, sometimes

Would pause & seem to consult notes left

On a podium, & then resume. A student once

Went up after class to look at them & found

Only a blank sheet of paper. Nothing there.

“In theory, I believe in Marx. In fact, my wife

Has to go in next week for another

Biopsy. Fact is disbelief. One day it swells up

In front of you, the sky, the sunlight on everything,

Traffic, kids on surfboards waiting for the next

Big set off San Onofre. It's all still there . . . just

There for someone else, not for you.” This is what

My friend Otto told me as we drove to work.

        ~

I worked with men in vineyards once who were paid

In wages thin as water, cash that evaporated & rose like heat.

They lived in rows of makeshift sheds the owner hauled

Into an orchard too old to bother picking anymore,

And where, at dusk, a visible rushing hunger

Raced along the limbs of the trees surrounding them.

Their kids would watch it happen until a whole tree would seem

To vanish under it. There were so many of them.

By then the rats were flying over a sickening trapeze of leaves

And the tree would darken suddenly. It would look like brown water

Rushing silently & spreading everywhere

Before it got dark anyway & the kids went in.

“There was more rats in there than there was beads on all the rosaries of the dead.

We wen' to confession all the time then 'cause we thought we might disappear

Under them trees. There was a bruja in the camp but we dint go to her no more.

She couldn't predict nothing. And she'd always cry when you asked her questions,”

A woman said who had stayed there for a while.

Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:

Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way

Her scuffed shoes looked in the pale light,

How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed

For thirty years without complaining once about it,

How she might have done things differently. But didn't.

How it is too late to change things now. How it isn't.

from
Blackbird

The guitar: I take communion

daily in this shack of a church

with a moaner's bench rubbed

smooth by repentant backsliders.

I listen to the seventh note,

graced by God, it is my battle-axe,

a joyful noise no more modern

than that old-time religion

cooking on the woodstove

in my grandmothers' kitchens.

Holy ghosted, I have been washed

in the blackwater cypress swamp

that flows inside my guitar.

A solid top, and I play it righteous

as any stingy brim disciple that ever

has played a small town bus stop,

and I got a missing canine tooth

from the right side of my mouth

and now my gospel is cobalt blue.

I remember the purity of the old guys,

Lucky Strike smokers and homebrew

drinkers with open tunings, sanctified

imperfections, scarred and battered

harmonies. They have introduced me

to the hollering haints who now hold

late night prayer service in my guitar.

I believe in the palm oil that anoints

the guitar. I believe in life as sure

as I believe in death. I confess

the ancestor spirits and their love

accompanies me. The bloodline

has dressed me in that glorious suit

that we only wear when we are

our true selves. In the ascending heat

there is a train of guitar moments,

boxcars of dualities in the everyday

choices that we make. I have been

delivered, blessed by this guitar

that brought me home from forty years

in the urban American deserts,

back to the piney woods of Carolina,

this old rugged guitar, my cross

to bear, this everlasting church

of the mule-driving sharecroppers.

from
MiPOesias

But I still have my river-mother

and all of her glittering fish,

my sycamore-mother who never is cold,

my star-white mother whose eyes

need no closing,

whose wind-stripped hands need not crochet,

whose dove-plain dress does not rip

on the drag of the gutter's wind,

whose kicked-off galoshes never lined up

with all the black pumps of the mothers