Cities & Urban Life

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,
These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,
Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,
Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’ s foot,
Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert
It’ s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind
Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel,
Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep
At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing

Side by side through the streets at midnight,
Roaming together,
Through the tumultuous night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.

Roaming together under the gaslight,
Day’ s work over,
How the Spring calls to us, here in the city,
Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!

Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces,
Cleansing, entrancing,
After the heat and the fumes and the footlights,
Where you dance and I watch your dancing.

my house’ s stairway is seized
with vertigo.
Matter having forsaken its laws,
we land in hell,
ascending to heaven.

*

Shadows move along ladders
under the silence of ordinary things
there is another silence:
it belongs neither to the leaves not to the
dead

When I was little I cut off the heads
of many lords. I can’ t count on the energy
that took to rise in me at will, but I’ ve
strengthened my ability to make a
stand-firm surface. A steady gaze will drive
conflicted information away, back to the
abyss from whence it came, but I’ ll be right
here the morning after, wracked in a
private shame too awful to admit and
of no consequence at all. I work very hard
not to let myself go. Any channel
can tell. Due process appears in beauty
and misgiving at once; an agility

Too many are leaving
usually they greet in sleep before dashing
as in today with this gentleman
(awkward not to type his name)
when yesterday in the shower
I remembered his face in Aardvark
something about NWA but not about them
just a played reference
There were newspaper clips
all police brutality, all framed with snow
& I vaguely recalled something
about Uma Thurman & the Menils
when the guard ushered me out
for touching the African sculptures
I waited in the lobby for hours

Lagos you are dirty
Your sand is soiled
Your fruits pithy.

I am tied to you
in a strange land
by lines that queue up
for foodstuffs you
should be eating but
ship off to me here
where I stand on check
out lines and marvel
at the cost of one
paw paw, just one mango
singular, along and apart
from you my dirty city.

O Lagos, your streets
are packed and pollute
the air while here in
a smug smogged city
I choke.

my ole man took me to the fulton fish market
we walk around in the guts and the scales

my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit
he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet”

my ole man show me how to pick the leavings
he say people throw away fish that not rotten

we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox
sold five fish, keepin one for the pot

my ole man copped a bottle of wine
he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot”

backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish
i make a fire in the ash can

I
Neon stripes tighten my wall
where my crayon landlord hangs
from a bent nail.

My black father sits crooked
in the kitchen
drunk on Jesus’ blood turned
to cheap wine.

In his tremor he curses
the landlord who grins
from inside the rent book.

My father’ s eyes are
bolls of cotton.

He sits upon the landlord’ s
operating table,
the needle of the nation
sucking his soul.

(Oakland)

Make it
the place
it was then,

so full it split
vision to live
there in winter

so late & wet
abundance
toppled toward

awful — birds
of paradise
a profusion

the ripe colors
of anodized
metal; in gutters

umbrellas
smashed
like pigeons,

bent ribs bright
among black
slack fluttering;

camellias’
pink imagoes
dropping

into water
& rotting,
sweet stink —

& did not
stop :
the inundated

Thou know’ st my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjur’ d up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken’ d to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Thence with what pleasure have we just discern’ d
The distant plough slow-moving, and beside
His lab’ ring team, that swerv’ d not from the track,