When I Think Of Tamir Rice While Driving

 

When one gets steam-rolled, as many of us were the Tuesday before last, one gets back up, dusts oneself off, hugs family and community, and gets back to work.

 

Why? Because there is so much to do. In the poem that follows, Reginald Dwayne Betts reminds us of things that need to be fixed and the challenges we will continue to encounter.

 

When I Think Of Tamir Rice While Driving

 

Reginald Dwayne Betts

 

in the back seat my sons laugh & tussle,

far from Tamir’s age, adorned with his

complexion & cadence & already forewarned

 

about toy pistols, though my rhetoric

ain’t about fear, but about dislike—about

how guns have haunted me since I first gripped

 

a pistol; I think of Tamir, twice-blink

& confront my weeping’s inadequacy, how

some loss invents the geometry that baffles.

 

The Second Amendment—cold, cruel,

a constitutional violence, a ruthless

thing worrying me still; should be it predicts

 

the heft in my hand, armed sag, burdened by

what I bear: My bare arms collaged

with wings as if hope alone can bring

 

back a buried child. A child, a toy gun,

a blue shield’s rapid rapid rabid shit. This

is how misery sounds: my boys

 

playing in the backseat juxtaposed against

a twelve-year old’s murder playing

in my head. My tongue cleaves to the roof

.  .  .

Brute Strength

Naomi Shihab Nye chose to highlight this poem, Brute Strength, by Emily Skaja, in her weekly column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on August 25. Nye also noted that U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo selected Brute, Skaja's first poetry collection, to win the Walt Whitman Award for the first-time poets.

In Brute Strength, "Skaja conjures the searing history of a jagged relationship, then mixes a tonic for it: images, elegies and invocations that let the speaker reinvent her human power," Nye wrote. And that, "reinvent[ing] her human power is exactly what Skaja does here.

Silenced, reduced by her experience, denied (or robbed) of agency, Skaja blasts her way out, lifting off from the memories of who she once was, a "witch girl, unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat...girl who wouldn't let a boy hit her"--that girl resurrected in her adulthood, promising to bust out or die trying. But, really, already busted out, no longer mute, writing her own story.

Brute Strength

Soldier for a lost cause, brute, mute woman

written out of my own story, I’ve been trying

to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods & parasitic ash

back to my beginning, that girlhood—

kite-wisp clouded by gun salutes & blackbirds

tearing out from under the hickories

all those fine August mornings so temporary

so gold-ringed by heat-haze & where is that witch girl

unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat, runt

of no litter, queen, girl who wouldn’t let a boy hit her,

girl refusing to be It in tag, pulling that fox hide

heavy around her like a flag? Let me look at her.

Tell her on my honor, I will set the wedding dress on fire

when I’m good & ready or she can bury me in it.

--Emily Skaja

So, a further thought. What's with all the ampersands? Skaja has done away with every "and" that might have occurred here, and why not? Ands don't do much and ampersands look so much more muscular. Do they change the meaning &/or impact of the things they conjoin?

Let's see: There's "swamp-woods & parasitic ash," there's "gun salutes & blackbirds," there's "heat-haze & where is that witch girl," & there is also "good & ready." It's not hard to imagine Emily Skaja, finally good & ready, thinking, "I don't need no stinking' and.

And while we're at scattered postscripts, I have to say that I have a poem of my own that includes respect for witch -girls, notably "Julie Anna, you were a witch baby, wise with foreknowledge."

Here is that poem:

Love to Babies
Nathan Night Rain,

you were an infant with

apple cheeks and patience.

Julie Anna,

you were a witch baby,

wise with foreknowledge.

And Brendan Isaac,

you were king baby

with windmill arms and bicycle legs,

wailing your loud strong music.

As Isaac brought joy

to Abraham and Sarah,

with a handful of weight,

with the heat of new beginning,

with the scent of everything to come,

so have you brought

gift after gift after gift

of Nate asleep on my heart,

warm weight waxing,

innocent of his fierce protector;

of Julie at midnight recalled,

fresh weight needing nothing

but that which was freely given;

of yourself,

urgent and new;

all of you, gift after gift after gift

to a father stirred and grateful

that the elements combined as you.

You and me talking Congo, gender, grief and ash

So, Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. Less than a week ago that hard reality landed on us with great weight and searing heat and withering cold. We are bereft. We struggle to make sense of it, but we find the fact of his victory so alienating that it leaves us isolated from each other. We wake in the dark fearful, afraid of the coming devastation. We cry unexpectedly. Trump's racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic campaign makes us wonder if we are safe, makes us wonder what has become of our allies. How much have we deceived ourselves and others about our world and our efforts to make it better?

Poetry may not be the answer, but it is one of them.


For Alice Walker
(a summertime tanka)

June Jordan

Redwood grove and war
You and me talking Congo
gender grief and ash

I say, 'God! It's all so huge'
You say, 'These sweet trees. This tree.'


from Poetry As Insurgent Art

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am signaling you through the flames
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs. Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?


Too

Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.


Night In The Kitchen

Adrienne Rich

The refrigerator falls silent.
Then other things are audible:
this dull, sheet-metal mind rattling like stage thunder.
This thickness budging forward in these veins
is surely something other
than blood:
say, molten lava.

You will become a black lace cliff fronting a deadpan sea;
nerves, friable as lightning
ending in burnt pine forests.
You are begun, beginning, your black heart drumming
slowly, triumphantly
inside its pacific cave.




Wild Once and Captured
On hearing Annie Lennox

Jeff Epton

A whisper full of rhythms,
an echo raw with power,
a people spilling outward
in tidal flows of fever.
Here music summons silence,

here longing a language,
touching an allure,
dancing a passion play
and searching leads us
one by one

to stories all our own,
and to stories told in common.
Here smolders spirit
rich and ripe with promise,
peace and legend.

There drums yammering in clearings
where we are jamming with justice
who was wild once
and captured
and has broken out again.

Joy Road and Livernois

Marge Piercy 

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed
till we heard blood dripping in the closet.
I fell in love with a woman who could ring
all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.
But she in her cape and her Caddy
had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,
a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets
to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing,
she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,
the white thunder rolling over till nothing
hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.
I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

My name was Evie, we used to shoplift,
my giggling wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;
we picked up boys together on the corners.
The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,
sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t
no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.
Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.
It was the cleanest thing I ever held.
It was the only power I ever had.
I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.
A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-
works my mom raised nine kids. My brother-
in-law porked me while my sister gave birth,
choking me with the pillow when I screamed.
I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.
Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,
always a bigger belly than me to push around
like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill
on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,
a tumor big as a baby when they found it.
When I look in the mirror I see my mom.
Remember how we braided each other’s hair,
mine red, yours black. Now I am bald
as an egg and nearly boiled through.

I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp
knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights
through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.
It made me feel as mean as any man.
My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.
All those hot night riding around and around
when we had no place to go but back.
Those nights we raced out on the highway
faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat
like shaken soda. It shot in an arc
when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,
the knife I showed you how to use still
on its leather thong between my breasts
where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.
I did not lay down in back seats with boys.
I became a nurse, married, had three sons.
My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours
among the dying and accident cases. My husband
left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,
a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.
My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest
ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches
the soaps since the Kelsey-Hays plant closed.
Then my boy began to call me from the alley.
Every night he was out there calling, Mama,
help me. It hurts, Mama! Take me home.
This is the locked ward and the drugs
eat out my head like busy worms.

With each of them I lay down, my twelve-
year-old scrawny tough body like weathered
wood pressed to their pain, and we taught
each other love and pleasure and ourselves.
We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,
the little names. At twelve I was violent
in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,
a starving weasel, all teeth and speed
except for the sore fruit of my new breasts
pushing out. What did I learn? To value
my pleasure and how little the love of women
can shield against the acid city rain.

You surge among my many ghosts. I never think
I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-
working, attractive. Evie was brave,
Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked
sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood
polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.
I wriggled through an opening left just big enough
for one. There is no virtue in survival,
only luck, and a streak of indifference
that I could take off and keep going.

I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air
eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs
dangle and you jump and jump, where there are
more drugs than books, more ways to die
than ways to live, because I ran fast,
ran hard, and never stopped looking back.
It is not looking back that turned me
to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines
under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.
Girls who lacked everything except trouble,
contempt and rough times, girls
used like urinals, you are the salt
keeps me from rotting as the years swell.
I am the fast train you are travelling in
to a world of a different color, and the love
we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch
rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

The beauty that flows in the blood

Sonia Sanchez writes in "haikuography," the preface to her book, morning haiku, that "from the moment i opened that book, and read the first haiku, i slid down onto the floor and cried and was changed. i had found me."

In the two-page essay, Sanchez somehow goes on to say more than one might expect to find in a short essay about self and poetry, about short pauses and long memory, about "the blood veins behind beautiful eyes, the fluids in teeth, and the enamel in tongues..."

Sanchez packs all that, the pauses and memories and bitter folk experience, into "15 Haiku," dedicated to Toni Morrison. In the 15th haiku, Sanchez asks,

"O will we selves ever
convalesce as we ascend into wave after
wave of blood milk?"

The answer, one imagines, can only come after poets like Sanchez have begun at the beginning and waited until the end to pose the question.

15 Haiku

(for Toni Morrison)

1.

We know so little

about migrations of souls crossing

oceans. seas of longing;

2.

we have not always been

prepared for landings that held

us suspended above our bones;

3.

in the beginning

there wuz we and they and others

too mournful to be named;

4.

or brought before elders

even held in contempt. they were

so young in their slaughterings;

5.

in the beginning

when memory was sound. there was

bonesmell. bloodtear. whisperscream;

6.

and we arrived

carrying flesh and disguise

expecting nothing;

7.

always searching

for gusts of life

and sermons;

8.

in the absence

of authentic Gods

new memory;

9.

in our escape from plunder

in our nesting on agitated land

new memory;

10.

in our fatigue at living

we saw mountains cracking

skulls, purples stars, colorless nights;

11.

trees praising our innocence

new territories dressing our

limbs in starched bones;

12.

in our traveling to weselves

in the building, in the journeying

to discover our own deaths;

13.

in the beginning

there was a conspiracy of blue eyes

to iron eyes;

14.

new memory falling into death

O will we ever know

what is no more with us;

15.

O will weselves ever

convalesce as we ascend into wave after
wave of bloodmilk?

the way it works

by Charles Bukowski

(who must be, in some important way,

Denny Zappin’s spiritual doppelgänger)

she came out at 9:30 a.m. in the morning

and knocked on the manager’s door:

“my husband is dead!”

they went to the back of the building together

and the process began:

first the fire dept. sent two men

in dark shirts and pants

in vehicle #27

and the manager and the lady and the

two men went inside as she

sobbed.

he had knifed her last April and

had done 6 months for that.

the two men in dark shirts came out

got in their vehicle

and drove away.

then two policeman came.

then a doctor (he probably was there to

sign the death certificate).

I became tired of looking out the

window and began to

read the latest issue of

The New Yorker.

when I looked again there was a nice

sensitive-looking gray-haired gentleman

walking slowly up and down the

sidewalk in a dark suit.

then he waved in a black

hearse which

drove right up on the lawn and stopped

next to my porch.

two men got out of the hearse

opened up the back

and pulled a gurney with 4

wheels. they rolled it to the back of the

building, when they came out again he was in a

black zipper bag and she was in

obvious distress.

they put him in the

hearse and walked back to

her apartment and went inside

again.

I had to take out my laundry and

run some other errands.

Linda was coming to visit and

I was worried about her seeing that

hearse parked next to my porch.

so I left a note pinned to my door

that said: Linda. Don’t worry.

I’m ok. and

then I took my dirty laundry to my car and

drove away.

when I got back the hearse was gone and

Linda hadn’t arrived yet.

I took the note from the door and

went inside.

well, I thought, that old guy in back

he was my age and

we saw each other every day but

we never spoke to one another.

now we wouldn’t have to.

Charles Bukowski died in 1994. If he were alive, and I had an opportunity to speak with him, I would point out an error (perhaps Bukowski’s, perhaps his editor) in the third stanza, which goes like this:

“the two men in dark shirts came out

got in their vehicle

and drove away.”

I think it’s clear from reading the rest of the poem is that most of the time, when Bukowski can put his articles (a, an, some, the) and conjunctions (and, but, etc.) at the end of a line, rather than at the beginning of the next one, he does so.

If one recites this poem out loud and deemphsizes the “thes,” “ands,” and “buts” at the end of each line, the poem tends to tumble forward conversationally, the importance of and separate impact of each action is diminished, and one gets that the speaker observes events around him through a haze that reflects his idiosyncratic understanding of his own mortality.

I’m betting that Bukowski meant to write the stanza this way:

“the two men in dark shirts came out

got in their vehicle and

drove away.”

Of course, the reader who is not prepared to accept my analysis might respond that in three instances in the very first paragraph Bukowski begins three lines with “ands” rather than putting them at the tail end of the line before. What, the skeptical reader might ask, do you make of that?

Nothing, nothing, I’d mutter and

stare off into the

middle distance until

I could see a

distraction of some sort rising up.

Levertov’s children: The Poets in the World

Denise Levertov’s book, The Poet in the World, is her quite engaging investigation of the process by which some of her own poems came into existence. But I am deeply distracted by the title.

The Poet in the World—something great implied here about poets and poetry. The ideal, the poet in the world, is transcendent. But reality lies in the pursuit of the ideal, the challenge that must be accepted, poem by poem, by poets in the world.

Levertov, a poet for change, a poet for human liberation, inspires me. In turn, what I want, more than anything else, is to inspire you because, if I am a poet, it is likely that some of the reasons why I am are also some of the reasons why you are, too.

Just the other day, a friend introduced me to Nawal.

“This is Jeff Epton,” my friend said. “He’s a poet,” which I think was a very affirming thing to say, and typical of my friend.

Nawal’s smile was brilliant and warm. Perhaps I flatter myself, but I inferred that she was happy to meet a poet.

“Are you a poet, also?” I asked.

Nawal demurred. “I write poetry sometimes,” she said.

I brushed her qualification aside. I’m sure you are a poet, I responded, reminded in the same moment of a fragment I had written recently about being surrounded by poets. (And reminded in this present moment that I read the fragment to Malik, who told me that he’s a rapper, not a poet, because he doesn’t go deep enough. But the truth is we’re all mostly just skimming the surface, only occasionally holding our breath for a deeper dive.)

In any case, Malik considered the passage and concluded that what I had written was, indeed, a poem. As it turns out, affirmations are everywhere.

I told Nawal about the poem, and about how it had been inspired by Levertov’s book. When I mentioned Levertov’s title, The Poet in the World, I could see in Nawal’s expression that the title, and all it might imply, resonated for her.

She said that she’d like to see my poem, and I asked for and received her e-mail address. I’ll send it along, I told her. But this morning I discovered the poem really was a fragment.

I hate to rush things (though Marrianne would tell you that actually I just don't like to finish things), but it has been hanging fire for too long, so I went ahead and finished it, for now. And, if later, the poem turns up again, somehow unfinished, I’ll finish it again, maybe. But in the meantime, it seems to be the case that muses, like poets, are everywhere.

And here, ushered into the world by Denise Levertov and Malik and Nawal and me and who really knows who else, is the poem, finished for now:

The Poets in the World

Am I a poet in the world?

A voice both anchored here

and cast away?

An echo dimly understood?

A whisper barely heard?

I am a poet in the world,

and when I am,

when I inhabit this place

and this place inhabits me,

I know some

of what there is

to know about the world,

how it tastes

in places, how it feels

in part, how the silence

sounds, how the noise

can sing from me,

even in the forest, in the cities,

with scattered ears to hear.

I am a poet in the world.

I want a taste,

a feel. I strain to see,

to hear the world ahead,

the lagging and the dragging world

behind.

I am a poet in the world.

I know to a certainty,

I send out words,

and words return to me.

I am surrounded.

So many voices.

So many poets.

Mr. Flood's Party, a poem and a bar

The Ann Arbor bar, Mr. Flood's Party, founded by Ned Duke and Buddy Jack some time during the summer of 1969, was an incredible place to hang out. One couldn't eat there, only drink, but often drinking was quite enough. And when one needed a breath of fresh air, or a toke, one only had to step outside, turn the corner onto Ashley Street and light up.

Buddy Jack was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after the bar opened. Buddy's absence and Ned's constant presence made it seem like the bar had always been Ned's. With his long dark hair and beard, overalls and gymnast's body, Ned was a confident and powerful presence. But he didn't seem to require much of anything from anybody else and his bar felt like a gift.

It also seemed a kind of wormhole, a way to enter the country lane described in the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem that gave Flood's its name. And maybe wandering that lane, or heading east (or, as Jim Florey says, "west") on Liberty after the bar closed, turning south into the neighborhood, one might even encounter Eben Flood, hanging out in Eberwhite Woods, muttering to himself and toasting old friends.


Mr. Flood's Party
by Edward Arlington Robinson

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will."

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn.
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He sat the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!"
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
"Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

"Only a very little, Mr. Flood--
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do."
So, for the time, apparently it did
And Eben apparently thought so too;
For soon among the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang--

"For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered, and the song was done.
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below--
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Brian Gilmore's revolution (for my father)

Brian Gilmore is a poet about whom Peter Harris is speaking when he says that he values those poets who do not elevate themselves above the work, itself. I recently had the privilege of attending one of Brian's poetry readings. He read one touching poem about his father, a different one is copied below. I wonder if Brian is capable of writing a poem that does not touch my heart.

my father was a dictator.

in 1968 dad suspended the house

constitution

instituted a state of emergency

suspended any rights television

made us think we had.

he declared tarzan a fake

nat turner important

malcolm x a brother

we must understand.

it was strange this regime

always looming like lightning

during a thunderstorm, but never

to harm, though we know the sky

is no friend of careless boys

who sometimes end up

walking home in the rain.

often my brother and I rebelled against

this totalitarian despot.

we declared civil war by

staying out until 4 or 5 a.m.

el presidente would be awake

when we returned,

calm in his demeanor, greeting us with

one of those well-prepared speeches,

like castro.

this constant pounding on our brains made us

surrender eventually, and end our unrest after

nearly 20 years of disorganized resistance.

the will of this monarch

became our will:

like, “you will go to school.”

“you will not destroy your life.”

now when I stop by my father’s house

the state of emergency is over

the revolution he declared was successful

the laws he passed are no longer in need

of enforcement.

these presidential duties

are exclusively mine now

and if

i am ever lucky enough to become

a dictator

i shall not hesitate

to crush tarzan and

give really long speeches

in

another language.

Brian Gilmore's billy bathgate (for Chico)

I have just recently gotten familiar with Brian Gilmore's poetry. Brian's poetry abandons nothing, brings everything with him as he goes. Brian's DC childhood is a big part of where he came from, and, as he moves on with his life, a big part of who he still is. This poem is a new favorite of mine. And it reminds me of Marge Piercy's "Joy Road and Livernois." In that poem, Piercy also brings everyone with her.

It is the first poem in his new book, We Didn't Know Any Gangsters

billy bathgate (for chico)

            all I’ve got is this picture.

it could have been van der zee

gordon parks,

oggi ogburn fresh from

a chancellor Williams

shoot.

we are capable boys;

innocent,

up some small mountain

in summertime

from that swamp of a city.

we couldn’t juggle balls

didn’t know any gangsters,

all we had was ice cold michelob

and red juicy melon

holy like water.

we didn’t know about rattlesnakes

that i’ve now been told are

all over that mountain.

all i’ve got is this picture.

i could call up the crew,

though some of them are

gone away now

like wisps of smoke.

others are here,

just floating on skyline

like kite

without string.

we were capable boys,

looking into the future as if we

would live like frederick douglass

or c.l.r. james.

did I mention the michelob?

red juicy melon

holy like water?

and how about those rattlesnakes?

all around us, now that we know

they are there.

all I’ve got is this picture.

unbreakable smiles.

lean frames.

polo shirts gripping young boys,

soon to be walking tightropes

without poles.

            it’s there, all of it.

            ice cold michelob

.

            melon holy like water.

            rattlesnakes.

            we couldn’t juggle balls.

didn’t know any gangsters.

            we were capable boys,

            all i’ve got is this picture.

Joy Harjo writes devastatingly beautiful stuff.

It is life affirming. Aspirational. Mythic.

Who would not want to be a poet if that meant one could write like Joy Harjo? Her book The Woman Who Fell From The Sky begins with a prayer, a tribute to Audre Lorde. I'm going to run the whole thing here, because there's no place I can see to cut it:

Reconciliation  A Prayer

I.
We gather at the shore of all knowledge as peoples who were put here by a god who wanted relatives.

This god was lonely for touch, and imagined herself as a woman, with children to suckle, to sing with–to continue the web of the terrifyingly beautiful cosmos of her womb.

This god became a father who wished for others to walk beside him in the belly of creation.

This god laughed and cried with us as a sister at the sweet tragedy of our predicament–foolish humans–

Or built a fire, as our brother to keep us warm.

This god who grew to love us became our lover, sharing tables of food enough for everyone in this whole world.


II.
Oh sun, moon, stars, our other relatives peering at us from the inside of god's house walk with us as we climb into the next century naked but for the stories we have of each other. Keep us from giving up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles.

We sing our song which we've been promised has no beginning or end.


III.
All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.


IV.
We gather up these strands broken from the web of life. They shiver with our love, as we call them the names of our relatives and carry them to our home made of the four directions and sing:

Of the south, where we feasted and were given new clothes.

Of the west, were we gave up the best of us to the stars as food for the battle.

Of the north, where we cried because we were forsaken by our dreams.

Of the east because returned to us is the spirit of all that we love.

for the Audre Lorde Memorial 1993

As her prayer unfolds, Harjo validates everything about us, even though we might gorge ourselves or give up "the best of us to the stars as food for the battle." I'm not sure that Harjo is really praying that "the spirit of all that we love" be returned to us. It seems to me that she's certain that is exactly what will happen. And she's sharing what she knows with us.

Harjo knows this sort of thing because she's always asking questions and getting answers back from somewhere. "Who invented death and crows and is there anything we can do to calm the noisy clatter of destruction?" she asks.

And, from precisely the somewhere to which I so recently referred, comes the answer:

When I hear crows talking, death is a central topic. Death often occurs in clusters, they say. They watch the effect like a wave that moves out from the center of the question. The magnetic force is attractive and can make you want to fly to the other side of the sky.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the gypsy Melquiades writes the history of the Buendia family, from its founder to the last Aureliano; writes in Sanskrit, I think, and then in code, writes relentlessly to chronicle the early history of the Buendias, so that he might catch up to the present and write the Buendias’ history as it unfolds, writes relentlessly so that he might go beyond the present to write the future of the Buendias as he envisions it.

Anyway, the Harjo I’m reading today seems to write our past, present and future in much the same magically competent way. But I can tell you that before this morning, I never appreciated Joy Harjo so much. Today I’m feeling her stuff deeply, not just in my brain, but in my skin and muscle, in my bones.

That sudden difference in my perception has seemed to come to me more often as I’ve begun to assume myself a poet. I was writing poetry for a good while before I experimented with the notion that I was a poet, and calling myself a poet for much longer before I realized how important other poets are to me, how much I like them, how much wisdom and grit and grace they possess, how much I want to be like them.

Maybe I had to call myself a poet before I could see that however great other poets are, they are also mostly people and can be understood on that basis. And so my appreciation has grown and I’ve bought some more poetry books and hopefully a few poets got slightly, very slightly, bigger royalty checks. One must hope.

But hope ain’t enough. Maybe the other lesson here is that the way to support poets is to first teach others to write poetry and find ways to nurture that effort in others until they begin to feel the swelling in their breasts that they, also, are poets and look around to see how many poets there are and get to hobnobbing with them, until all around it gets to feeling like a nation of poets.

Forget, a nation of individualists, forget all the old metaphors, a herd of whatevers, let’s us pass out the paper and pencils and pour or hearts out. Let’s build a nation of poets. Of good old ‘Merican poets. 

We all have a song inside. Poetry is a way to get to that song. The expression of those many songs taking shape as millions of pencilled poems on millions of paper scraps is the path to becoming a nation of poets. Joy Harjo's poetry is constantly uncovering songs and dance and drums and the profound music of silence, both inside and out.

The soundlessness in which they communed is what I imagined when I talked with the sun yesterday. It is the current in the river of your spinal cord that carries memory from sacred places, the sound of a thousand butterflies taking flight in windlessness.

                                 from Harjo's "Wolf Warrior"

Within that song was the beauty of horses. My son's name means lover of horses.

                                 from Harjo's "Sonata for the Invisible"

June Jordan

For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka)

Redwood grove and war
You and me talking
gender grief and ash

I say, 'God! It's all so huge'
You say, 'These sweet trees: This tree'

June Jordan's simple poem about a walk she took with Alice Walker is poignant and important. The poem gets where it's going without pretension and with a very big heart. It makes me want to be a better poet. And the poem seems like evidence that poetry can capture and express complicated feelings, evidence that I can share with people, including friends, who say they don't 'get' poetry.

Those are the two main reasons why I used For Alice Walker to introduce a section in my book Wild Once and Captured. Because I wanted to associate myself with a real poet and I wanted people who don't read poetry to think that it really can speak to them, about them, and, even, on their behalf.

I used to read Jordan's columns when she was a regular contributor to The Progressive. She was a powerful writer and an acute political thinker, though not always a subtle one. Like, here, for instance:

"Into that infamous Tuesday inferno of fire and structural collapse, a humbling number of men and women fell to a horrifying death. And now the rest of us remain, stricken by fear, stricken by grief.
We have become a wilderness of jeopardized loved ones, and terrifying strangers," Jordan wrote during the buildup to war that began so suddenly in the weeks after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I sometimes thought her writing poetic, but I rarely thought of her as a poet. I would read her columns and move on, almost always affected, sometimes greatly moved. I can't help thinking that she affected me so often and so strongly because she was a poet, whether or not I was aware of that condition.

On an unnumbered page at the very beginning of Naming Our Destiny, a collection of her poems, there are 16 lines, untitled, that put me in mind of magic and great mystery, and of Jordan's occasional mastery of those things:

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
They are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

In the book the lines are italicized, but the rest of her poems are not; maybe to make those lines feel more conversational, maybe just to make me pay more attention. And I do pay attention...I mean, I am...I mean, I will...but when Jordan says she is "reaching for you, whoever you are," I start thinking about a similar set of lines from Walt Whitman:

Whoever you are
now I place my hand upon you
that you be
my poem

I love that Whitman and Jordan (both of whom frequently announced that they were "an American") reach out with "desperate arms" and lay their hands on us with such abandon. I give my absolute consent to Whitman and Jordan both. Come ahead, feel me, and let your touch linger.

The truth is, Jordan thinks about such things all the time:

Meta-Rhetoric

Homophobia
racism
self-definition
revolutionary struggle

the subject tonight for
public discussion is
our love

we sit apart
apparently at opposite ends of a line
and I feel the distance
between my eyes
between my legs
a dry
dust topography of our separation

In the meantime people
dispute the probabilities
of union

They reminisce about the chasmic histories
no ideology yet dares to surmount

I disagree with you
You disagree with me
The problem seems to be a matter of scale

Can you give me the statistical dimensions
of your mouth on my mouth
your breasts resting on my own?

I believe the agenda involves
several inches (at least)
of coincidence and endless recovery

My hope is that our lives will declare
this meeting open

Jordan's poems sometimes count the dead in places like Soweto and Nicaragua and Mississippi. Rape, each time it happens, occurs over and over again, because Jordan feels each rape as though it happened to her and, she wants us to understand, it happens to the rest of us, too.

When a woman was gang raped in a notorious incident in New Bedford, Mass., Jordan felt it:

This is a promise I am making
it here
legs spread on the pool
table of New Bedford

she wrote in Poem on the Road, for Alice Walker.

The complete poem is so full of Jordan's anguish and rage, it keeps breaking rhythm and building a new one and breaking it again. It's like Jordan can hardly talk and hardly stop talking.

June Jordan puts me in mind of Walt Whitman a lot, except she never pretends to a booming pride. But around the two of them, you never know when sex might break out, or wounds might begin to bleed, or compassion well up.

June Jordan was so fierce and so loving and so passionate about the blood that flows in all of us that
we risk terrible loss if we forget her, or never know her. She's still out there for the knowing.

Marge Piercy's Joy Road and Livernois

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed

till we heard blood dripping in the closet.

I fell in love with a woman who could ring

all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.

But she in her cape and her Caddy

had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,

a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets

to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing,

she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,

the white thunder rolling over till nothing

hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.

I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

My name was Evie, we used to shoplift,

my giggling wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;

we picked up boys together on the corners.

The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,

sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t

no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.

Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.

It was the cleanest thing I ever held.

It was the only power I ever had.

I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.

A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-

works my mom raised nine kids. My brother-

in-law porked me while my sister gave birth,

choking me with the pillow when I screamed.

I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.

Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,

always a bigger belly than me to push around

like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill

on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,

a tumor big as a baby when they found it.

When I look in the mirror I see my mom.

Remember how we braided each other’s hair,

mine red, yours black. Now I am bald

as an egg and nearly boiled through.

I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp

knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights

through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.

It made me feel as mean as any man.

My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.

All those hot night riding around and around

when we had no place to go but back.

Those nights we raced out on the highway

faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat

like shaken soda. It shot in an arc

when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,

the knife I showed you how to use still

on its leather thong between my breasts

where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.

I did not lay down in back seats with boys.

I became a nurse, married, had three sons.

My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours

among the dying and accident cases. My husband

left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,

a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.

My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest

ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches

the soaps since the Kelsey-Hays plant closed.

Then my boy began to call me from the alley.

Every night he was out there calling, Mama,

help me. It hurts, Mama! Take me home.

This is the locked ward and the drugs

eat out my head like busy worms.

With each of them I lay down, my twelve-

year-old scrawny tough body like weathered

wood pressed to their pain, and we taught

each other love and pleasure and ourselves.

We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,

the little names. At twelve I was violent

in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,

a starving weasel, all teeth and speed

except for the sore fruit of my new breasts

pushing out. What did I learn? To value

my pleasure and how little the love of women

can shield against the acid city rain.

You surge among my many ghosts. I never think

I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-

working, attractive. Evie was brave,

Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked

sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood

polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.

I wriggled through an opening left just big enough

for one. There is no virtue in survival,

only luck, and a streak of indifference

that I could take off and keep going.

I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air

eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs

dangle and you jump and jump, where there are

more drugs than books, more ways to die

than ways to live, because I ran fast,

ran hard, and never stopped looking back.

It is not looking back that turned me

to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines

under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.

Girls who lacked everything except trouble,

contempt and rough times, girls

used like urinals, you are the salt

keeps me from rotting as the years swell.

I am the fast train you are travelling in

to a world of a different color, and the love

we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch

rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

"Joy Road and Livernois" by Marge Piercy, from Available Light. (c) Middlemarsh, 1988.