And hunger from my ears. I know the lyrics
Of the oldest love song: “Don’t You Think I Ought to Know.”

Don’t you think I ought to know, Baby, the doctrine of the Blues,
The spells and fevers of the Blues, the Blues’ epistemologies?
I know the lyrics of the oldest love songs. And the new ones too.

Why bother rise and dress now that you are gone?
Why bother boogie woogie? “I’m Tired of Everything but You.”

TOUR DAUFUSKIE

TOUR DAUFUSKIE

On that small island
during a tropical storm
in the last century

people tied to the necks
of pine trees drowned

when the wires and whips
and webs and ropes
of rain covered their bodies

so that when we moved
along the dirt back roads
and paused

to photo the AME church
and one room schoolhouse
and small shacks
of the black folk of Daufuskie

no voices trailed us
or floated out to greet us.

Sometimes now
the trunk of a tree
resembles the waist
of a black body;

sometimes your naked waist
still and rooted before me,
smells thick and sweet
as the freshly cut meat of a pine.

When I knock against you,
it is like swimming from the world

out to the small island of Daufuskie
in the witching hour of a storm,
like drowning in the arms of a tree.

A POSTCARD FROM OKEMAH

A POSTCARD FROM OKEMAH

Turned from the camera’s eye, hovering,
between river & bridge, the hung woman
looks downstream, & snagged in the air
beside her, the body of her young son.

They are tassels on a drawn curtain;
they are the closed eyes of the black boy
who will find them while leading his cow
to the river bank; they are the bells

that will clamor around the animal’s neck
when it lowers its head to drink.
The boy dangles in midair
like a hooked fish, his pants hanging

from his ankles like a tail fin.
On the bridge women pose
in aprons & feathered bonnets,
the men wear wide-brimmed hats

with bow ties or dungarees;
there are three small girls leaning
against the railing, & a boy nestled
beneath the wing of his father’s arm.

I count sixty-seven citizens & children
staring at what must have been a flash
& huff of smoke. The photographer
must have stood on a boat deck,
though from this angle
he could have been standing on the water
with his arms outstretched.
He must have asked them to smile

at the camera & later, scrawled his copyright
& condolences on the back of the postcards
he made for the murdered man’s friends.
“The Negroes got what would have been due

to them under process of the law,”
the sheriff said. His deputy
had been shot when the posse searched
the suspects’ cabin for stolen meat.

To protect her son, the mother
claimed she’d fired the gun.
The mob dragged them both
from the jail bound in saddle string.

If you look closely you can see a pattern
of tiny flowers printed on her dress;
you can see an onlooker’s hand opened
as if he’s just released a dark bouquet.