Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.

How she stood up

when they bent down to retrieve

her purse. That courtesy.

QE2. Transatlantic Crossing. Third Day.

Panel of gray silk. Liquefied ashes. Dingy percale tugged over
the vast dim earth—ill-fitting, softened by eons of tossing
and turning, unfurling its excesses, recalling its losses,
no seam for the mending, no selvage to catch and align
from where I sit and look out from this rose-colored armchair
along the gallery. I can hear the chime of the elevator,

the hush of trod carpet. Beyond the alcove, escorted widows

perfect a slow rumba. Couples linger by the cocktail piano,

enmeshed in their own delight as others stroll past,

pause to remark on the weather. Mist, calm seas.

This is a journey for those who simply wish to be

on the way—to lie back and be rocked for a while, dangled

between the silver spoon and golden gate. Even

I’m thrilled, who never learned to wait on a corner,

hunched in bad weather, or how many coins to send

clicking into the glass bowl. I can only imagine

what it’s like to climb the steel stairs and sit down, to feel

the weight of yourself sink into the moment of going home.

This is not the exalted fluorescence of the midnight route,

exhaustion sweetening the stops. There’s

no money here, just chips and signatures,

no neat dime or tarnished token, no exact change.

Here I float on the lap of existence. Each night

I put this body into its sleeve of dark water with no more

than a teardrop of ecstasy, a thimbleful of ache.
And that, friends, is the difference—

I can’t erase an ache I never had.

Not even my own grandmother would pity me;

instead she’d suck her teeth at the sorry sight

of some Negro actually looking for misery.

Well. I’d go home if I knew where to get off.

In the Lobby of the Warner Theatre,
Washington.D.C.

They’d positioned her—two attendants flanking the wheelchair-

at the foot of the golden escalator, just right

of the movie director who had cajoled her to come.

Elegant in a high-strung way, a-twitch in his tux,

he shoved half spectacles up the nonexistent

bridge of his nose. Not that he was using her

to push his film, but it was only right (wasn’t it?)

that she be wherever history was being made—after all,

she was the true inspiration, she was living history.

The audience descended in a cavalcade of murmuring

sequins. She waited. She knew how to abide,

to sit in cool contemplation of the expected.

She had learned to travel a crowd

bearing a smile we weren’t sure we could bear

to receive, it was so calm a suturing.

Scrolling earthward, buffed bronze

in the reflected glow, we couldn’t wait but leaned out

to catch a glimpse, and saw