Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa
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Under House Arrest
I won’t crawl into
your cathedral of ashes
& gopherwood to buy an hour
digging my grave. Nightsticks
have bashed every drumhead,
but in the Anlo of my bones
I’ll fight till the grave-
digger throws dirt in my face.
Listen, big man around town,
hear my silence. Tom-toms
rattle across indigo hills,
& my tongue’s heavy as a gold piece.
One grunt of wisdom
remains. But Yemanja
knows how to heal
this song, dancing naked
in my brain. I gaze all night
at the moon through a crack
in the wall, till nothing
rises & sinks back on its haunches
into damp secret earth.
—for Kofi Awoonor
Translating Footsteps
She says Go fuck yourself
when I say Good-bye & good luck
with potted plants
under a granite moon.
A hand reaches from behind
to slash my throat.
Some things refuse translation:
the way I place my hands under
red silk to hear
a thin-skinned drum;
language of growing grass;
tombed treaties forgotten like lamps
left to burn out in a ghost town.
Each pause a clock inside stone …
digital, monumental as a grain
of wheat. Translate this
mojo song, footsteps
in a midnight hallway.
My doors enter from the sidestreet,
my windows painted basement black,
my mouth kisses the blues harp,
my heart hides like notes
locked in a cedar chest.
Urban Renewal
The sun slides down behind brick dust,
today’s angle of life. Everything
melts, even when backbones
are I-beams braced for impact.
Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone
shaped into dry air
white soundsystem of loose metal
under every footstep. Wrecking crews,
men unable to catch sparrows without breaking
wings into splinters. Blues-horn
mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing
but the white odor of absence.
The big iron ball
swings, keeping time
to pigeons cooing in eaves
as black feathers
float on to blueprint
parking lots.
Magpies
In Magpie Hollow thorns
scratch a cow’s hide
in a snowfield. But
what’s a nick where iron
hissed a circle around an X?
This inky swarm
tries to peck its way
into a cage through snowy air,
into open wounds.
They dive for the eyes
of the uninfected, spreading
affliction, rise
& circle back
like a blaze of locust,
the sky falling to the ground.
The Tongue Is
xeroxed on brainmatter.
Grid-squares of words spread
like dirty oil over a lake.
The tongue even lies to itself,
gathering wildfire for songs of gibe.
Malcontented clamor, swish of reeds.
Slow, erratic, memory’s loose
grain goes deep as water
in the savage green of oleander.
The tongue skips a beat, link of truth …
a chain running off a blue bicycle.
It starts like the slow knocking
in a radiator’s rusty belly.
I enter my guilty plea
dry as the tongue of a beggar’s
unlaced shoe. The tongue labors,
a victrola in the mad mouth-hole
of 3 A.M. sorrow.
Ten Speeds
A deer in the body
bends into a kaleidoscopic hurrah
of bellbirds let go.
Imported ten speeds
zoom past like a shoal
of women struggling
against the aluminum day
to get out of their clothes.
The same wind that seeds
the valley with nasturtium
rattles every door & window,
& tangles in calico.
She jabs thigh-flashes
into the heart, riding away
with the sun on her shoulder.
(E)Motion
The oldest wheel, the setting sun
carries this world
seaward on its back.
Piece by piece. Star
by star, & stone
by stone it goes.
The wheel grunts
& labors under
night’s black shoulders.
I cannot stand for another letdown
to crawl into my life
thin as a half-cracked egg.
Hey! wherever you’ve been
I’ve been there with my tongue
in