Providence

      I walked away with your face

      stolen from a crowded room,

      & the sting of requited memory

      lived beneath my skin. A name

      raw on my tongue, in my brain, a glimpse

      nestled years later like a red bird

      among wet leaves on a dull day.

      A face. The tilt of a head. Dark

      lipstick. Aletheia. The unknown

      marked on a shoulder, night

      weather in our heads.

      I pushed out of this half-stunned

      yes, begging light, beyond the caul’s

      shadow, dangling the lifeline of Oh.

      I took seven roads to get here

      & almost died three times.

      How many near misses before

      new days slouched into the left corner

      pocket, before the hanging fruit

      made me kneel? I crossed

      five times in the blood to see

      the plots against the future—

      descendent of a house that knows

      all my strong & weak points.

      No bounty of love apples glistened

      with sweat, a pear-shaped lute

      plucked in the valley of the tuber rose

      & Madonna lily. Your name untied

      every knot in my body, a honey-eating

      animal reflected in shop windows

      & twinned against this underworld.

      Out of tide-lull & upwash

      a perfect hunger slipped in

      tooled by an eye, & this morning

      makes us the oldest song in any god’s throat.

      We had gone back walking

      on our hands. Opened by a kiss,

      by fingertips on the Abyssinian

      stem & nape, we bloomed

      from underneath stone. Moon-pulled

      fish skirted the gangplank,

      a dung-scented ark of gopherwood.

      Now, you are on my skin, in my mouth

      & hair as if you were always

      woven in my walk, a rib

      unearthed like a necklace of sand dollars

      out of black hush. You are a call

      & response going back to the first

      praise-lament, the old wish

      made flesh. The two of us

      a third voice, an incantation

      sweet-talked & grunted out of The Hawk’s

      midnight horn. I have you inside

      a hard question, & it won’t let go,

      hooked through the gills & strung up

      to the western horizon. We are one,

      burning with belief till the thing

      inside the cage whimpers

      & everything crazes out to a flash

      of silver. Begged into the fat juice

      of promises, our embrace is a naked

      wing lifting us into premonition

      worked down to a sigh & plea.

Water

      If only I could cleave myself from the water table

      below this two-step, from this opaque moan

      & tremble that urge each bright shoot up,

      this pull of the sea on fish under a pregnant

      moon. I sweat to buy water. It breaks

      into a dirge polishing stone. The oathtaker

      who isn’t in hock to salt merchants & trinket kings,

      says, Drink more water, Mister Bones.

      The taste of azure. To rinse bile from the bony cup

      of regret, to trouble rivers till the touch of gold

      Columbus & his men killed the Arawak for

      floats up to ravenous light, to flush out every tinge

      of pity & gall—each of us a compass star

      & taproot down to what we are made of.

Jasmine

      I sit beside two women, kitty-corner

      to the stage, as Elvin’s sticks blur

      the club into a blue fantasia.

      I thought my body had forgotten the Deep

      South, how I’d cross the street

      if a woman like these two walked

      towards me, as if a cat traversed

      my path beneath the evening star.

      Which one is wearing jasmine?

      If my grandmothers saw me now

      they’d say, Boy, the devil never sleeps.

      My mind is lost among November

      cotton flowers, a soft rain on my face

      as Richard Davis plucks the fat notes

      of chance on his upright

      leaning into the future.

      The blonde, the brunette—

      which one is scented with jasmine?

      I can hear Duke in the right hand

      & Basie in the left

      as the young piano player

      nudges us into the past.

      The trumpet’s almost kissed

      by enough pain. Give him a few more years,

      a few more ghosts to embrace—Clifford’s

      shadow on the edge of the stage.

      The