If all men are created equal, all men are prophets,
at least at the very start and end of their lives, I bet.
Cicily, as the curse I’m casting here prescribes, won’t like blacks
any more than she likes looking into a mirror in a burning house.

Still, I can almost promise you time travel will never be invented.
At first Cicily will think someone rescued our photograph
from a puddle of ashes. It’s like those stories
we wind up telling ourselves about ourselves after our friends are
gone.

It’s as if we will always be somewhere smiling or singing.
Maybe you can imagine the end of the line, Baby, but history
is beyond me, I admit it. Either she will discover my apology
or she will never be forgiven, and that will be a function of the curse.

It’s like one of those days that are wished for, but never guaranteed.
She will marry a man who says: “But blacks are different, they were
burned
black by God.” “They dance in their sleep.” “I love you” will slither
from its little sheath of hunger and that too will be a function of the
curse.

Which is why not too long ago you and I argued about race
and the question was: If I don’t believe in evil, do I also not believe in
good?
I meant to say yes, because my mother loved me as if one of us was
two people.
Remember when our three year old asked why we weren’t white?

To be black is to blacken a little every day, I should have said.
And how at the end of a life filled with music we all go without singing.

THE HERITAGE CHANNEL

THE HERITAGE CHANNEL

In the movie about the making of the movie about slaves
a dust colored chandelier was hanging
like a dust covered chandelier in the foyer
of an abandoned mansion and my pout-mouthed Ma
said she wanted to find a chandelier like that—
she’d get one of the homeless to hang it for a six pack
and transportation she said, and who said anything about slaves?

We spent a few nights smudged between the walls.
Nights of inviolate wine and laughter, mornings with a finch opera
outside our windows.

I come from a long line of hairdressers in wigs,
of blind folk in shades: a caught line, a long line
of bastards and farmers with no sons, of jibber jabber,
of “I’ll put my foot so far up your ass, you’ll be shitting my footsteps,”
of “she used to,” “he used to,” and “we,” and ennui,
of “When was that?” and “Who?” and “That’s why they call it work.”

We spent a few nights in the village.
Nights trading subservient curtseys
below a ceiling fan hanging like a chandelier.