There I was shoveling a furry former body into the trunk
and phony to say what were the eyes were lit
as if my headlights still cooked each pupil and that look
rimmed in stupidity could have easily been mistaken for peacefulness
were it in the face of a dead man and it was.
Who said anything about slaves?

A few nights tethered together.
A few nights attending our own show.
I come from a long line of bastards. My mother remembers
a black man who arrived one Sunday.
Her sister and two brothers called him Stranger.
They said “Your daddy brought you nothing,” jealous,
when she went with him across town to see his distant cousins
who sat on the porch of a fine blue house asking
“How is your wife?” “How is your daughter?” “Who is that child?”

Saying the blood is burgundy after dark.
Saying the dark is blood.

Say Evil and the word will drain your good sense,
but sing it and the child will know her father ran away or was run over
and buried all the same. It might win you Providence
should you have the sort of know how the Lord is said to possess.
That’s why they call it Faith.

Muzzled in cool wind.
Muzzled in moonshine and deaf as a placenta.

I come from a long line of dead men.
My grandfather’s medals rust in a felt lined case,
kept safe and forgotten by a daughter
who has his name but only half his blood.
The houseplants reaching for the dirt,
the night’s color seeping through holes
left by the pictures she took from the walls.

There is no such thing as evil without love.
No one asked about our wardrobe.
We talked to, but not with.

That damn fool was in the woods asking for moonshine
when, like a spill of black ants exiting a corpse,
the Negroes of the American South crawled North
to the small and various catacombs of industry.
My kinfolk stayed behind with him trying on names
the way one tries on shoes at a sharecropper’s funeral.
Who said anything about slaves?

A few nights attending our own movie.
A few nights muzzled in booze.

They said “Your daddy brought you nothing,”
when she returned, her shoes shined by the cuff
of his white, white sleeve, her breath sweet with candy
that traveled all the way from New Jersey in his pocket.

We returned so covered in history,
we had to wash it from our scalps.
I opened the window and I was not to be trusted.

I come from a long line of divas who taught themselves
the wrong love and were too generous with it,
too made-up and covered and dancing
at happy hour with lips the color of wine.

We spent a few nights smudged between the walls.
Nights with the finch opera outside our windows.