Let me varnish them blue
& brush them with salt
as a lover should do.

Leagues of stars have fallen
against me;
a procession of lovesick moons.

I am a willful woman
walking to church
in black shoes,

The one who can bend
the coast;
the one who can juggle
storms & pearls
in a mouth
that will never grow old.

Let me tell you the legend
of the widow whose tears
filled seven valleys.

Let me varnish your bones.
I know of a room
where no hours are kept.

Let me dress them in salt.
Let me fill you with a bounty
more enduring than breath.

IV. Self Portrait / Vision

IV. Self Portrait / Vision

The man tells nothing. He carries nothing,
He is covered by almost nothing,
But strokes of light.

He knows what I would like to know:
How a white man came to paint beauty
Into a black man’s face,
& why he left sharks slashing the water below his feet?

But he does say.
I am not his kin. I, who was born
Of a people who never learned to swim,
People who had no word
For the blue line that divides each day;
This is why he does not look my way.

So we pine for his never-minding scowl:
Homer at his easel in 1899,
As the harbor filled with saltwater & lightning;
& me these last months
I’ve spent staring at the painting
As rain & wind walked hand in hand into this city.

Did he know it would storm that day,
This mariner or fishmonger,
This refugee backtracking
Through the Middle Passage,
Kingdom of the unsalvaged, the hushed fathoms;
Fleeing home to find home?

I can pretend, but I do not know enough.
Or I know as much as Homer could have known
Of what a drowned man feels:

The flood of last wishes;
& the hours beginning
To darken & drift off course.

As a child I’d sneak to watch teenagers
Roughneck in the neighborhood pool.

One night as I knelt at the deep end
Stroking the water,
A white boy shoved me in.

Can you remember the womb?
How, in the moments before birth,
The lines were washed from the map
That told the route you’d come?
Perhaps drowning feels that way.

The one who saved me had dark skin.
He left me on my side
Gasping for air like a startled fish.

After my father removed my soaked shirt & sneakers,
He got his belt.
He beat me until welts rose
Like new muscles along my arms & legs;
Like brushstrokes along my back.

I learned living requires a kind of discipline;
A reverence for the law of gravity.

But I have wanted,
As I want when I look at the painting,
To unhouse my body.

I have wanted the kind of grace God gives
Only to the drowned;
The boundlessness

Of a man conjured
Out of gossip & time,
Out of theories of demise;

Of a man who will not be the painter’s handsome one,
Who does not ask for help,
But awaits the tide’s eulogy.

SLEEPING WOMAN

SLEEPING WOMAN