Two Poems

Aftershocks

for Dionne Brand

No rescue. Escape was the farthest

She could come, away

from that island—that chance

she would take on that stone

in her hand, on a place

with no one she knew.

So perhaps the signs were all

reflex, the habit of aftershocks

Bare in a new world,

she was given what could not

last without the lye of her,

bloodlines, anyplace

recalled, memory had etched

the tunnels of a nameful hundred,

rivers gulling the roads, before

the miracle of driftwood, malls & factories,

rooms pregnant with all.

Familiar, the ranking plumes that vanish—

leaving us curled—

what we long for

is hard to explain.

Like false pentameters

credo on our cupid’s bow,

what wild continent names

another place that sees

the barren clearing claimed

& loved. What psalms us

to spend our many selves in code

or water, vernacular & captive

Leaves her new century

Relic: by another life,

made-up enough to strike

star-music against the weight

of her island, like the sampled

high-pitched moan of the Dodo

as it falls into that chasm of loss.

Linger, my sandmaker breath

Slap up against the walls of this house

Fill her up here

in the city or two-thirds out

at a distance’s abrupt portrait

for which her names would not do

& what have I? Have I forgotten too

what that thick slab of noise

drowns and drowns beneath

her age. A passage

For the persisting flesh—already locked

& knocking in its burned metal slip—

Singe winter against the spring

& now the birds are not

the little things with tunes

about the horror of mountains.

Linger: ocean, voodoo sea,

why end here with morning

Now hold her with whatever is left

Whatever trembles with a noise

Nobody but the radiator makes

No usual sound of crickets, frogs

& chorus of beetle—keep

the cry of whatever now lives

alone with the matchbox’s

crude apostrophe, mantle & heat on her

wreath at the great road’s hush

There is no rescue—

Rescue is too much to ask

Of anywhere—

Tonight, The Mayfly

The mayfly’s elliptical

end looks like some ruined plan

What’s buried beneath

islands? Not the catacombs

of blended footprints

coalesced, and the entire

gathering of the missed who

wait at the prisons’ gates

If a kingdom ever spawns beneath my shifting

skin, give me claim to another earth,

until all my confessions have fallen

like ghetto cobwebs

The wound of another excavation, the sacred

books of whose viscous clouts of invented ancestry:

I demand answers if only for the few 
hours I have left

Entering this world—I grow tired under the

artificial red of this flambough-night

Whose letterheads grow tired of my ruse

What actual figures fail

in the new stomachs you hope

unaltered, will calm the seas

that make my-selves unclear? I count the brittle

bones at the foundation of a family underhand—

In vas(in)deference, give me

any stake in a calling

higher than my double-visioned self.

I am yesterday, there, and then not—

In a dream I hold savage.

Open to strike February into mullet,

daughter, gestating son, miss teach,

choir-girl never nun to a mother’s discontent

Some sonorous exfoliate

Every feathered memorial in which we are like mayfly subjugations

to what’s still, a one-way glance through the window of some moving craft—

We do not suppose

Pompeii more tragic

than our invisible ports,

bearing all our children into

the potholed plan

of that inheritance.

So, tonight

between our teeth, between

index and thumb, between

washes of coral

and the immobile Achilles:

these pronouns balanced on middle

finger, this side of the chained meridian

level even the brass of your statues

Here dissect the hereafter:

commonwealth

cistern from palm-woven basket

dracula from la jabless,

René Descartes from Sesenne Descartes

Irish moss from the grilled pigtail

Decline into the mauby valley, unearth your tune & reverse time

Why choose sides when you’ve found the doctrine of sudden bloom

Well, that strandy radio beep

Kinks in the muddled script—

This time, choose not to hear

That ethnic name in dewlap misnomer,

or color codes to streak like hair.

We are not your fingertip calling wind—

Into your own insatiate coffers, bate for

single ounce ghetto-youth outpaced on

corners, swapped for palladium stars pinned

to your chests. Who rigs these four-by-four

cyphers between their bars

between charcoal & wall & banks the coloured loot

Looped tracks are these that pile up

in the trodden mines of the black mouth—the day is brief

A minor place for the Mighty Sparrow’s dying,

Here TuPac fumes the breeze with Beethoven

These networths sway through us brightest when telescopic

Yarded and beating, like bars across the skull of the earth

Count on us to stay anchored, pound for pound,

A million small lives

With no irrational fear

of flashing lights--

That long way to Goblëki & Mayfly

Hoards! What joy to outlive the fishflies

Without ever loving the mirage

music of the chain-link

Fence off

The ghetto