at the office machines, their clack and chatter

another journey—rougher,

that would go on forever

until she could break a hundred words

with no errors—ah, and then

no more postponed groceries,
and that blue pair of shoes!

Black on a Saturday Night

This is no place for lilac

or somebody on a trip

to themselves. Hips

are an asset here, and color

calculated to flash

lemon bronze cerise

in the course of a dip and turn.

Beauty’s been caught lying

and the truth’s rubbed raw:

Here, you get your remorse

as a constitutional right.

It’s always what we don’t
fear that happens, always
not now and why are
you people acting this way
(meaning we put in petunias
instead of hydrangeas and reject
ecru as a fashion statement).

But we can’t do it—naw, because
the wages of living are sin
and the wages of sin are love
and the wages of love are pain
and the wages of pain are philosophy
and that leads definitely to an attitude
and an attitude will get you
nowhere fast so you might as well
keep dancing dancing till
tomorrow gives up with a shout,
’cause there is only

Saturday night, and we are in it—

black as black can,

black as black does,

not a concept

nor a percentage

but a natural law.

The Musician Talks abut “Process”

(after Anthony “Spoons” Pough)

I learned the spoons from

my grandfather, who was blind.

Every day he’d go into the woods

’cause that was his thing.

He met all kinds of creatures,

birds and squirrels,

and while he was feeding them

he’d play the spoons,

and after they finished

they’d stay and listen.

When I go into Philly

on a Saturday night,

I don’t need nothing but

my spoons and the music.

Laid out on my knees

they look so quiet,

but when I pick them up

I can play to anything:

a dripping faucet,

a tambourine,

fish shining in a creek.

A funny thing:

When my grandfather died,

every creature sang.

And when the men went out

to get him, they kept singing.
They sung for two days,
all the birds, all the animals.
That’s when I left the South.

Sunday

Their father was a hunting man.

Each spring the Easter rabbit sprung open

above the bathroom sink, drip slowed

by the split pink pods of its ears

to an intravenous trickle.

There was the occasional deer,

though he had no particular taste

for venison—too stringy, he said,

but made Mother smoke it up just in case,

all four haunches and the ribs.

Summer always ended with a catfish
large as a grown man’s thigh
severed at the hip, thrashing
in a tin washtub: a mean fish, a fish
who knew the world was to be endured
between mud and the shining hook.