Chorus (6 page)

and he chose.

Can I show her the bowl of fruit on my floor where you sit

naked and hungry, pear juice dripping down your chin

and puddling in my own mouth?

Or ask if she has ever followed salt sweet lines

down her back with a lover's tongue?

Can I give her the handful of cherries, thick-fleshed,

like the first moment I tasted my own sex?

Imagine the smell of that kitchen; my mother

sucking pits like small wet songs on her dry tongue.

Leek rounds, rainbow chard, coriander, broth

slow-cooked, I don't mention the room

in the house of me where you live,

desire and
devastation
sleeping curled

together like dogs at the doorway.

We came from each other, and then we began to eat

from separate plates, elbows off

the table. She gives me her borsht recipe

without measurements,

says: do it to taste,

and I do

i am
not
beautiful

i am an
elegant
beast

a well-mannered monster

a charming barbarian

that will pillage your heart

with language

so lavishly
violent

that you will curse me for coming

yet curse me for going

your crying and your moaning

will share the same sound

i am the storm

that will make your sunny days unbearable

but when the clouds begin to hug and swell

and push black kisses into each other

when the white and airy

becomes dark and full

you will know im in the mouth of the horizon

and she will breathe me
thundering across your heaven

all good reason

says seek shelter

but you will invariably find yourself

running into a open field

the wind

shooting under your skirt

a furious sky in your hair

goosebumps on your thighs

your mouth open to catch the rain

that smacks your face

your tear ing eyes

towards heaven

waiting for me to send down

my most gorgeous disaster

my most frightening lovely

for which you have spent your sunny days supplicating

woe to you, God has answered your prayer

“We need a doctor in the ICU, description elderly couple, 1 suffering from a shivering equinox

The other bad case of eclipse”

Momma “We didn't hang their
ghost
out long enough to dry” washboard, clothes line

It's always hard wringing the bones out
of a spirit

Some days, I fold my throat; pack it in the truck of a black hearse cramped

Middle passage cruise liner, hopscotch down

Route 81, countryside hums like
midnight
, the air thick with the history of me

Here I'm all white picket fence and picket sign

“Check their vitals”

My great-grandparents used to bathe in onyx, bore last names delicate as cotton

“Garner” with an ER like sirens, gurneys or an

Eerie house sculpted from the pulse of one womb

The smell of a praying skillet playing jacks with a pot of grits

Back burner like welts, Church on Sunday morning, in a town

That tastes like nooses, winters fever porch swing backyard hammock

Fist full of rice, jumped the broom, segregated blood waiting on the other side

“Let's put him over here, lift”

“Boy this contraption can't hold me long, what's my superhero name iron lung”

Marlboro lights and silence is all I know of my great grandfather

Worked the coal mines, called him big O for Otis, godly hands, grip

Like a bear trap shake Christ out of you,

Earthly man, never able to crack the husk of him

Crucified footprints, dirt roads burning U-Hauls

The clan moved in next door

“We're going to have to run more tests”

“Come rub gram grams feet, massage a few decades from my steps”

My great-grandmother's name was Esther

All apron and foxhound had a bite like boycott, smiled like pistol whips

2 green thumbs patch of land, her eyes two dilating ashtrays

Ribcage furnished like a western salon, bar fight laughter

Protest the moonshine, this is a sit-in

“Not to be the bearer of bad news, but we found something, no cause for alarm with treatment

You can see 6 more months”

I'm a shade of flatline

(cough)

“Don't smoke cigarettes, son “

Otis died crying crickets in his chest, crooked cops place a handcuff

Over a heartbeat this is what you call cardiac arrest

Cells were never meant to split this way

“I know this is hard, one by one you can go in and say your last words”

Poppa, hold me in your arms like a rigid mountain peak

“Shhhhh
don't tear, boy, I've been breathing like a steel mill all my days, 'bout time I retire”

Momma, don't leave, “Child, watch my crops, scare the Jim crows”

see their souls rising; I take my palms to try shoving their childhoods back into their bones

This is my defibrillator to the sky all that

Thunder clap!!

“No more bullets on hotel balconies

No fire hose baptisms

“They're not responding”

Pink ribbons, crumbling Saint Jude, heart-shaped obituaries

“I told you about my Jesus

Look heaven, freedom's waltzing across that labyrinth dance floor

Million cloud March boots laced, silver lining stride to redemption”

“Baby we'll see you on the other side of the colored line”

I turn to the doctor and ask him when will we have a cure for this?

Not all errors are mistakes

Brutal images often evoke emotion but

offer no hope against this harsh landscape

Let us open wide the doors less fortunate

so that the heavy
wind
, rain and snow can rush in
and

save us from the black clouds lurking over the blood red horizon

Old incandescent
light
bulbs flicker in dimly lit corridors

Let's listen to the tragically beautiful silence of the morning after

There is no escape from the time and place where fiction occurs

Of the sunken barge in the water where life has taken root,

we know the moral.

We know where there is waste something can be profited.

We know for nature there is no waste.

Only opportunity. That is the charge you granted us,

early in the garden, before we ducked behind the elephant ear

to hide our nakedness. That was the first ch
a
rge, at least.

The second: that we'd never forget.

We know that all we realize is
derivative
of
your
love
.

That everything we know will not eliminate what we don't:

why parade this beauty in our faces? Why make desirable

the bones of the men who must have embraced

the night the barge slipped under? Forgive me, Father.

I am human. That means I have an ego.

That means I can't find solace in the tree that now commands

this ship, the branches stretched and
twisted
as your love,

although they also,
like
the bones,

make me choke.

What do you want me to say,

that I like the idea of being an animist, trees my

preferred object of worship? Not once has any
tree

ever told me a thing let alone scooped me up and saved me

from the impending flood or an army of orcs surging

from the bowels of earth, sorry, Gaia, ok, Yemaja,

-yeah, yeah, The Ocean, let me finish-

I
have
listened carefully . . . once I climbed a six-story-high Maple to listen.

Just when I felt I was making some headway a drunk childhood friend

(we were friends since we were children and then adolescents experimenting

with everything from heights, to alcohol to God, just like you want to

instead of normal flirting) climbed one branch above me to see what I was up to.

The last
branch
actually, which snapped under her light, perfect athletic young body.

She fell six stori
es
, landing on her back conscious enough to know instantly

she was paralyzed and would never ski again. No, that by no means broke her

faith, nor mine, but I highly doubt swapping notes on spiritual practices

is her preferred method of
flirting
. She is still devoted to sports.

I have not had visions when holding crouching dog for too long or is it arching crane?

I have done neither, but one time I went to Havana
with
a person much like yourself.

We got a reading from a santero, he gave us beads and a deity each, the beads were so heavy

we had to take the D Train to Brighton Beach and throw them into the sea.

I'm short of breath in saunas so I have never done a sweat lodge but three of my four

deadliest car crashes happened in Vermont where there are many non-Native American

sweat lodges

and after emerging miraculously unscathed from
the gnarled remains
of 3 out of 4 accidents

(once it was snowing) the sky was profoundly clear and blue, yeah like a door,

maybe a window, not sure.

Sure I've had a poem just
‘come to me as if I were a mere vessel
,' but not for

a long time and even those needed editing. Nothing sticks a thorn in my crown

more than a poet fishing to get laid with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo all prostrate

in a room full
of
guppies. You are correct, the gods' ability to arouse is profound and

not inappropriate but it can be awkward, like in
'
85 when I wanted to convert to Catholicism

in Apizaco Mexico because I was obsessed with the
glow-in-the-dark crucifixes

sold outside the church, I wanted to buy as many as I could to sell to

Madonna fans in Boston but felt it would only be appropriate to convert first.

As I toyed with the idea, the idea grew until I could feel generations of Aztecs

pass through me when an old woman brushed my shoulder after prayer. Finally

one evening, after feeling embarrassed about buying yet one more glow-cross

from the same guy five days in a row, I stuffed it in my pants, it began to glow, I felt it,

my abdomen abuzz, my first look at a Victoria's Secret catalog, ten, alone in the bath.

For all I know God is in lunch, during Ramadan we chose God over lunch for a month.

At sixteen I walked into La Grande Mosquée and announced I wanted to convert to

Islam.

They asked me to say
Allah ila haa Mohammedan rasulullah,
so I did.

They said,
There ya go, you're a moslem.
Yes, it felt anti-climactic even in French.

Then again, celebrating Eid a year later with two thousand other moslems

in the foothills of the Himalayas in un-self-conscious synchronicity was proof

that Allah passes through all of us, with each transfer of spirit, unknown energies

are more palpable. Many times that year I had out-of-body experiences

to the point where I could see myself in context and realized I looked

as post-colonial as the Aussie hippy in Haridwar, saffron robes, beads

and bald head tonguing down his girl in front of Maya Devi Temple.

I will tell you this, one week after my brother died I saw something in the sky

(no, I won't tell you what it was) that affirmed my belief that everything,

every faith, myth, superstition, miracle, rumor, conspiracy, cult, self-help program,

everything, all of it is true.

Truth: I have never apologized for my own skin before,

for the way Newark bends me like sunrise
gleaming through bus windows

or the way I let myself go like doves at the matrimony of fate and free will.

Tell me this is the way things fall apart.

Truth: My ex-significant lover walked out of Buddy Wakefield's feature last night on the

premise that God lives in North Carolina between the eye of a needle and the thread

weaving Aesop's fables together. He claims to have a keen ability to detect heresy and,

apparently, lynch mobs don't need rope or melanin before.

Lie: I am to blame.

Lie: A legacy of shame on the underbelly of a nation can be remedied

with

handshakes and convenient silence.

Truth: There are times when I am insecure in my humanity,

in the way my

body contorts and bleeds to keep this universe in balance.

Truth: Prejudice is the only way we've learned to box our own shadows,

saints whose

halos are one photon short of revealing themselves.

Truth: God could exist in the air,

blowing string-theory daffodils into the

nothingness without a care.

Would our trespasses be any less holy?

Dare-

tell me what your God looks like

sitting on a crumbling mountain of misdeeds

and

family trees bending in the wind.

Tell me how he learned to hate his own shadow,

how he taught his
spitting
images
to split and

splinter