MASTERY

The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,

I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reach

casts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breach

this page where my own hand spectates. Babylon

risen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

If I remember my own name, then I can ego

my way through this crowd of shadows

that cross the bridge of my back mid-bow.

I slept in the Fifth House of Modernism,

beneath stars that offered no light—dust

full of fear, my own dead skin encrusting

room corners and my mind in a schism

between image and luck. When I awoke,

the empire rose in me and I was risen

from its dead letters to the letter, chiseled

by my own invisibility, this war between smoke

and reflection, between self versus self conniving

in the longest hall of my fear to remain there.

Many doors scraped open, their alabaster

knobs ghost-turned while voices as convincing

as a mother’s slipped out. I looked into one room

and found a window broken into a smile, wind

whistling Confederately through the glass.

Tell me why I grinned and hollered back a tune:

“Away! Away! I wish the masters dead.” To be freed

I tried to revise The Waste Land but blacker,

where Margaret Garner speaks to Margaret Walker

on a barge crossing the Mississippi River. I see

the aftermath of this meeting, slow

in the river mud fondling the delay.

They will make it across. They will pray.

They will drown beneath what they know:

that the living have undone so many

and the river’s dark portion was the color

of a baby’s dried blood, the neck wound dolorous

in its grin-shaped curve, another mangled

bridge into history. Who could name the salve

between two women death had undone,

one woman so sure of whom she’d undone:

Garner the master. Garner the slave.

The river unfurls its god tongue

in Nigger Jim’s voice. He speaks of rivers

as the river, soul grown deep into a river

carving a country like an infant’s throat.

There are many ways to freedom, with a hymn’s

lithe blade or a butcher knife. Even now the blood

running through the river runs through my hand,

black as a cock that crows for dawn hilt-to-hide till mum.

Dawn does not know it cannot drown me.

Sunrise gilds all water the same dull pageant

and I am water after all. Sun-rinsed,

my skin coal-hisses, a conquered city, the first flame.

Call me Chicago, call me Lake Michigan.

I, an unnatural mirror for enlightenment,

spit back ash rivaling Pompeii. Relent

to whom? For what? Night will come again.

The stars’ epistrophes, their bright punctuations,

insult the dark and puncture night again

with haunting past tense. Emblazoned

with myths and maps of light, imagined

cartographies making use of fire and fear,

night will come again, a cover, beast’s blanket

or runaway’s winter shawl. A cliché of crows sinks

its hatchlings in a man’s maw. He rears

their small nights to maturity. He speaks

in sunsets. This is the end of the world.

Even an ended world needs a mythology.

Like snow, like breath, like rust, like feet,

night will come again and over a sobbing

woman who has found her mother’s grave

for the first time and succumbed to elegy.

Her cries bleed over the dirt with a strange insistency.

Away, away, a world drowns beneath this knowledge:

Hurston hidden in the Garden of Heavenly Rest.

Eden’s daughter in the dust. White dresses nest

in a magnolia. Their bodiless silhouettes

sit watch as the passing season makes tombs

of the trees. Sweet and fresh, the sudden smell

of burning years passes by. Elegies ride the tail-

winds. Splayed bodies for a sail, the womb-

swell of ghosts pushes ships toward a present

filled with flags and saddles, religions and burned drums.

Do not permit them passage, Lord. Imaginations

can be so open and what steps through, what sprints

from the past, is just another unjust symptom

of drapetomania fondling this fiction’s curtains.

Do not permit it passage, Lord. A stain

uninvited, there’s no telling what light will do. Some

drunk off the street hollers at passersby the interpretation

of “Juba Dis,” but no one understands, the hexed threads

of his iris another river to get lost on. What was said

by the hambone hustler harping on predictions

divined from his palms was that love was not enough,

and what I thought was love was only a gateway

for the dead. Once I had a lover, not gutless

but as much imprisoned in himself as he was afraid of

imprisoning me in his splayed body. He would lie

down with me and tell me all the ghosts who rushed

to him in the dark: an uncle who died hard, whose eyes

were the color of two deep injuries; pale women who touched

and gaped at him; a more demonic form the size

of what could have no size that choked him while,

on the other side, his ex-lover slept. This he told me

after thrusting into my mouth as though building for us

a myth to explain what had happened and would inevitably,

again, happen. “I could draw a picture of it for you,”

he said, and, looking around for tools, set about doing

until I told him no. He shared all his so-called demons:

the undead kin, the blood he kept secret, the semen

he didn’t. Three years later, in an obscure text,

he tells me this without telling me, as though my own blood

would respond to clues. “I never came in you,” he didn’t

say. Nor did I not want him to—to say, to come.

Already in me he was and wasn’t and I was ready

to be bound to him by the veins. The slum

alphabet of forgiveness petrified my unsteady hand.

I watched from a phone screen’s glow my life’s

buttons pop all at once and behind the fabric

unhid a new life, ecstatic, gothic with flies.

Blood-bound, a marriage multiplies the fable.

I splayed my body’s opiated rooms. Rank

wind galloped from the cavity, dry as the harmattan.

It must be winter in me. Why rush back

into invisibility? Father, is that you? My harm?

My father must have seen such sights—

he was very old when he died—

or heard of them,

or had this danger touch him

my father was not old when he died

but he looked as the possessed look

his face an apiary a wasp den prying

like a fact from a story’s gap I shook

him in my nightmares and all the drugs

spilled from the wasp-size holes

never knowing what drug it was

that took him I made them all his to hold

we counted them and they were twelve

my father the Father who carried the end

of civilization which is the beginning of time

in his nose his lungs his mind

in his veins the wash of second chances

he never shared his demons with me

but he made new demons like new dances

to entertain himself the King the king the king

and danger touched him, sniffed

his crown, deemed it unworthy, inedible,

and ate the flesh instead. Perchance this myth:

a giant struts from the Bible,

one man’s monster another man’s test.

“Be humble,” says the hero, “Lil bitch,”

replies the chorus, and the epic of our lives rests

in a radio’s top-ten playlist, in the darkness

there where no one will ever see, in the stereo’s

electric heart circuiting a boy’s chest. John Henry,

let the man breathe, let the reins of his veins go.

Your spooky love won’t do, John Henry.

Your boogie-woogie love won’t do, a lover’s face

carved into a map and who could leave this violet

city—sorry, I meant violent; I meant to trace

the scar on an enslaved woman’s forehead

caused by a mule’s kick. The scar is the gate.

I think we’ll find our answers there, the how

we got here, into the mind of York shaking

a deer off his back for his master to devour.

Into the mind of a darky specimen tamed

by a hug, by a white woman’s smile.

Into the mind of a polyester suit framed

by black hands and a white mind. John Henry, chile,

is that you in danger of being touched?

Are you Mapplethorpe’s “Super Nigger,”

your hammer near-hand, cool desire cutting

you off from the neck up? Is that you, Bigger?

Should’ve saw you coming a mile away,

cutting off that white woman’s head

’cause you lost your own. Which way

hea’ben be is where I be headin’.

I saw you, Mother Mary, floating in a puddle,

your porcelain neck broken and letting all

the water in. Can’t drown that way, cuddled

by the waves you birthed, water your gall

and ointment, your rage and your mercy.

I told a friend to stop messing with the loa

and he heard “the Lord.” Have mercy,

my Chicago southern tongue don’t know

a from r. Don’t know London

from Brooklyn. All bridges lead one place.

Crossing the water, the dead who have undone

so many raise their hands through the surface,

raise their heads in canon. In the wake

of disaster, a wake. In water whelmed with attendance

and attending histories anchored to stakes

anchored to chains clanging panegyrics, another chance.

Heaven is where I’ll be headed:

a deer walks to Lake Michigan and sips

from putrid water then looks up, the tips

of its antlers prick the sky like stars lending

soft fire to the scene; a hunter lends his arrow

to its bow and flexes a shoulder blade, elbow bent

to aim into the deer’s side a pierced distance.

Air divides from itself to reveal its spectral marrow.

O, choosy god, choose me. The blue-

amber sky requiems my solstice.

I am the longest day of myself, blissed

here in truncated perfection, a hue

of indictments I made into keys.

Shoot me, hunter. By all things planetary,

sweet, I swear the arrowhead’s pathway

into me will be the doorway, entry

into my own self-raised heaven. My head

I raze. My Babel tongue a tender memorial.

Glossolalia in exorcism, a territorial

narrative—this glossary of organs, this shedding

of seconds for a pen. I move without editor.

You see this: the blinding light reprimanded,

revision inconclusive, cannons wasting the land, and

the masters, their remnants, garnered in their human error.