Ray’ s third new car in half as many years.
Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer
as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush
and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud.
All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again.
Somewhere in the bush near Saint John
there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother
who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities.
One week Ray is crocked. We’ ve been through this before.
This is everything she ever closed a door
on, the broom closet of childhood
where no one could ever find a broom.
Here, layer upon layer, nothing breathes:
photo albums curl at the edges, books
she brought home from the library
where she worked, handled by thousands
of other hands before their final exile
where they’ ve waited, paper and more paper
taking in the ocean air, about to sprout.
Not even the males and the men of the males
make use of their pinched tongues
to sing, not even the females
and the women of the females, corollas stemmed to spray on end
sing their ruddy stones
The males and the men of the males
feel the sea
the ranch and the wheat, rice ears
polyglottal weddings
unseasonable lips
one body to the next
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
My father and I lie down together.
He is dead.
We look up at the stars, the steady sound
Of the wind turning the night like a ceiling fan.
This is our home.
I remember the work in him
Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost.
And I imagine the way he had fear,
The ground turning dark in a rain.
Now he gets up.
And I dream he looks down in my eyes
And watches me die.
I place these numbed wrists to the pane
watching white uniforms whisk over
him in the tube-kept
prison
fear what they will do in experiment
watch my gloved stickshifting gasolined hands
breathe boxcar-information-please infirmary tubes
distrusting white-pink mending paperthin
silkened end hairs, distrusting tubes
shrunk in his trunk-skincapped
shaven head, in thighs
Heraldry and all its lovely language;
I chose my time there learning
elsewhere, where else than land,
Landscape, and how to live, in it
is not like, nothing is like, the colors
or the snow, it is not like pearl and
it is not like the glitter of rainwater
that darkens the bark against which
the occasional bloom-laden branch
might be seen shedding petals. No.
Here is the past: One was once a boy
and read books and could not pronounce
Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.
Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.
The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe
all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours
in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,
a reaction sending out runners across her chest,
a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back
into fashion, their son coming back
from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime
and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger
spread down the long hallway of their house
and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’ s doubled
