NEW JERSEY POEM

after Willie Cole’s “Malcolm’s Chickens I”

One of the many Willies I know wants me to know

there are still bits of hopefulness being made

in certain quarters of New Jersey. It’s happening

elsewhere too, obviously, this Willie would say,

but have you seen the pants sagging like the skin

on a famished elephant and the glassy stupor

of counselors in the consultation rooms, the trash

bins of vendettas and prescriptions, have you seen

the riot gear, what beyond hope could be a weapon

against all that? The summer I drove six hours

to Willie Brown’s place I found him building

a huge chicken out of brooms, wax, marbles (for eyes),

Styrofoam, and hundreds of matchsticks, but what

I remember is the vague sorrow creasing his face.

Like it wasn’t a chicken at all at hand, like he’d never

even seen a chicken in New Jersey, or a feather

or drumstick—which I know to be untrue. A man can be

so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being,

a flavor indistinguishable from spit. He hadn’t done shit

with the letters and poems his wife left behind

when she killed herself. I think she was running,

I think she was being chased. She is almost floating

below ground now. The grave is filled with floodwater,

the roots of trees men planted after destroying the trees

shoot through her hips. Nowadays when I want saltwater

taffy or some of those flimsy plastic hooks good for hanging

almost nothing, I do not go to New Jersey. And I’m sure

no one there misses me with all the afflictions they have

to attend. Grief will boil your eyeballs if you let it.

It is possible to figure too much, to look too much,

to be too verbal, so pigheaded nothing gets done.

In those days, that particular Willie denied he was

ever lonely in New Jersey. His head, he said, was full

of handcrafted tools, and beneath his tongue he claimed

was a button that, when pressed the right way, played

a song, a kind of chain gang doo-wop. To which I said,

Willie, that’s bullshit, you stink like a heartbroken man.

I wanted to ask if he’d read the letters his wife left.

Somehow we made it from Atlantic City to the VFW bar

in Trenton without losing ourselves. I drove us through

a pre-storm breeze and a sickish streetlamp twilight

until there was rain on the windshield and voices

dispensing threefold news of what might happen,

what does happen, and why whatever happened did,

the soul’s traffic. Somehow we weathered all that.

The chicken is in a museum somewhere now, worth

more than God, I bet, and so much time has passed

I can’t be sure which Willie made it. That night we had

some of its smell on our fingers. But the men we found

in the bar’s humiliating darkness still invited us in.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE MIND OF A CAMERA

after Charles “Teenie” Harris

Because everyone and everything we see is a self-portrait,