There, I was less than nothing. I took a train
To Harlem; a ship to Denmark to be free.
I can only tell you that here, I ain’t

Who I used to be. I am a Negro who has lain
With a white woman in a foreign country.
Momma, forgive this letter covered in paint.

I ain’t coming back. Here, no one complains
When Holcha & I kiss in the street.
Color doesn’t tells us what we are & what we ain’t

Never going to be. I have left my name
On the walls of a dozen museums & galleries.
I have covered my face in paint.
I cannot tell you who I am, but who I ain’t.

ODE TO BALTHUS

ODE TO BALTHUS

Old dirty, dirty. Old dirty, dirty handful of skin & motion.
There is a girl in white and girl in green & red and girl in nothing
And each is walking away. Handful of crimson ribbon
Pulled from hair tangled like rain around a girl’s face.
Handful of blood & bliss and the pain of blood & bliss.
How long before their fingers curl into questions
Deadly as the scorpion’s tail? The studio filled with a virgin’s
Ruined smell. Old dirty, dirty handful of light & space.
Girl sprawled on a couch, a girl on a horse, girl in a mirror.
The orchid’s tender stem in a hipped-shaped vase.

“THE GULF STREAM”/ FOURSTUDIES

“THE GULF STREAM”/ FOURSTUDIES

I. Homer / Apparition

then my dream went black as a sea without borders

I’d seen the back of a woman waiting on a pier
in a blood red shawl
she’d found my dozen sketches
of the young half-naked Negro tether-veined thick-necked
his scowl looking away
a vision so foreign she left my house
& ran until the tide took her in
a blackness finally she nor I could possess
in the dream I’d been ready to hold him
to stroke a thin line out of nothing
I wanted to give him the brave & tender loneliness
of the sea he was going to tell me
what the world was like without sun
but my brush fell my dream went black
& I could not make him swim out of death

II. Fishmonger / Libation

II. Fishmonger / Libation

To the gasp,
the murmur and swell.

To the premonition
that becomes a wound.

To the narrow path
that leads from everything.

To the fishmongers who live,
to the green mermaid tattoos
covering their scars.

To the fishmongers’ wives,
grateful
even when their men return
with empty nets.

(How will my family survive?
How will my boat be found?)

To the snapped mast.
To the sunken prow.

To the blue blue
and each fin and tooth.

To the glimmer of salt
on the skin.

To the scent of drifting,
the rock & sway.

To the tide’s radiance
unwiring the tongue.

A toast
to this long-standing rain
this holy water,
to this poisoned wine
I drink.

III. The Sea / Temptation

III. The Sea / Temptation

Let me varnish your bones,
Let me dress them in salt;
a thousand years of rain
covering fortune; your bed
& heaven, both halves
of the distance from home.