Wind in a Box

Terrance Hayes

Also by Terrance Hayes

Hip Logic
Muscular Music

Title Page

Copyright Page

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First published in Penguin Books 2006

Page vii constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hayes, Terrance.
Wind in a Box / Terrance Hayes.
p. cm.—(Penguin Poets)

eISBN : 978-0-143-03686-9

1. African Americans—Poetry. I. Title.

PS3558.A8378W56 2006
811’.5—dc22 2005053460

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Dedication

For Yona and Ua;
and for Aaron becoming

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sincere thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications for first acknowledging the poems (and previous versions of the poems) in this book:

Antioch Review, Ascent, Bay City Review, Black Renaissance Noir, Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Corners, Caketrain, Callaloo, Crowd, 88, failbetter, Fence, Fugue, The Gingko Tree Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, The Indiana Review, The Journal, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, Kestral, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Swink, Third Coast, Tin House, and West Branch.

“The Blue Terrance” [I come from a long line . . .”], “A Postcard from Okemah,” “Talk,” and “Wind in a Box” [“I claim in the last hour . . .”] also appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Cate Marvin and Michael Dumanis, editors. “Harryette Mullen Lecture on the American Dream” also appeared in Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America, Virgil Suarez and Ryan G. Van Cleave, editors. “Pine” also appeared in Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, editors, Camille T. Dungy, assistant editor. “Pine” and “The Whale” also appeared in the Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Sue Ellen Thompson, editor. “Threshold” also appeared in Poets on Place: Tales and Interviews from the Road, W.T. Pfefferle, editor. “Tour Daufuskie” also appeared in The Pushcart Prize XXVIII: Best of Small Presses, 2004, Bill Henderson, editor. “Variation on a Black Cinema Treasure: Broken Earth” and “Variation on a Black Cinema Treasure: Boogie Woogie Blues” also appeared in the 2005 Best American Poetry, Paul Muldoon and David Lehman, editors.

Deepest gratitude to Yona Harvey, Tony Hoagland, and Shara McCallum for offering their insights and talents to the completion of this collection; and to the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support. Thanks, as well, to those who influenced this manuscript through friendship and spirit: Elizabeth Alexander, Radiclani Clytus, the Cave Canem family, Jim Daniels and the CMU community, Joel Dias Porter (DJ Renegade), Paul Slovak, Jeff Thomson, Crystal Williams, and the rest of my kin, both literal and figurative.

Epigraph

I tell a story of bodies that change . . .

—Ovid’s Metamorphoses (via DJ Spooky)

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.
This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.
This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming
an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.
This shudder. This is where I stood: by the bed,
by the door, by the window, in the night / in the night.
How deep, how often / must a woman be touched?
How deep, how often have I been touched?
On the bone, on the shoulder, on the brow, on the knuckle:
Touch like a last name, touch like a wet match.
Touch like an empty shoe and an empty shoe, sweet
and incomprehensible. This ink. This name. This blood
and wonder. This box. This body in a box. This blood
in the body. This wind in the blood.

WOOFER (WHEN I CONSIDER THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN)

When I consider the much discussed dilemma
of the African-American, I think not of the diasporic
middle passing, unchained, juke, jock, and jiving
sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets
and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother
Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child
of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish-
American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist.
I forgot all my father’s warnings about meeting women
at bus stops (which is the way he met my mother)
when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October
because I have always been a sucker for deep blue denim
and Afros and because she spoke so slowly
when she asked the time. I wrote my phone number
in the back of the book of poems I had and said
something like “You can return it when I see you again”
which has to be one of my top two or three best
pickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten lucky
on a first date you can guess what followed: her smile
twizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatter
on my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothing
but shoes. When I think of African-American rituals
of love, I think not of young, made-up unwed mothers
who seek warmth in the arms of any brother
with arms because they never knew their fathers
(though that could describe my mother), but of that girl
and me in the basement of her father’s four story Victorian
making love among the fresh blood and axe
and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter
executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest (his face
was starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy American
poppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofers
because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to anything
remotely ritualistic or African, for that matter.
We were quiet enough to hear their chatter
between the drums and the scraping of their chairs
at the table above us and the footsteps of anyone
approaching the basement door and it made
our business sweeter, though I’ll admit I wondered
if I’d be cursed for making love under her father’s nose
or if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell.
I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightened
and bewildered, but when I consider the African-American
I think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed
by madness or that we were assigned some lousy fate
when God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Time
or that we were too dumb to run the other way
when we saw the wide white sails of the ships
since given the absurd history of the world, everyone
is a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonder
if outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?).
I think of the girl’s bark colored, bi-continental nipples
when I consider the African-American.
I think of a string of people connected one to another
and including the two of us there in the basement
linked by a hyphen filled with blood;
linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.

TALK

like a nigger now, my white friend, M, said
after my M.L.K. and Ronald Reagan impersonations,
the two of us alone and shirtless in the locker room,

and if you’re thinking my knuckles knocked
a few times against his jaw or my fingers knotted
at his throat, you’re wrong because I pretended

I didn’t hear him, and when he didn’t ask it again,
we slipped into our middle school uniforms
since it was November, the beginning

of basketball season, and jogged out
onto the court to play together
in that vision all Americans wish for

their children, and the point is we slipped
into our uniform harmony, and spit out Go Team!,
our hands stacked on and beneath the hands

of our teammates and that was as close
as I have come to passing for one
of the members of The Dream, my white friend

thinking I was so far from that word
that he could say it to me, which I guess
he could since I didn’t let him taste the salt

and iron in the blood, I didn’t teach him
what it’s like to squint through a black eye,
and if I had I wonder if he would have grown

up to be the kind of white man who believes
all blacks are thugs or if he would have learned
to bite his tongue or let his belly be filled

by shame, but more importantly, would I be
the kind of black man who believes silence
is worth more than talk or that it can be

a kind of grace, though I’m not sure
that’s the kind of black man I’ve become,
and in any case, M, wherever you are,

I’d just like to say I heard it, but let it go
because I was afraid to lose our friendship
or afraid we’d lose the game—which we did anyway.

BLACK HISTORY

X wrapped his hands around my throat,
and I wrapped my hands around his,
and then the two of us were in the wet grass

wrestling beneath a star clogged night
like two heads fighting for the same body
or maybe like two bodies fighting

for the same head while a circle of black
and white kids, and the girl who had been
his valentine (and would be again) watched.

This was after the annual Black History Month
Talent Show where my roommate and I sang
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” shirtless and baby-oiled

in black jeans in the name of what I’d call now
Dumb Buck History, but what I thought then
was a way to look sexy for all the girls

in the audience. We lost to two black leather-clad
brothers who recited Run DMC (“Two years ago
a friend of mine asked me to say some MC rhymes . . .”)

passing the big mic back and forth between lines,
and I know now it makes sense since
Black Cool seemed worth more than Black Pride,

rap worth more than gospel that day, and anyway
my roommate forgot several of the words
which would have been alright since no one

in the building (myself included) knew
the whole song, but instead of playing it off,
he moaned Baaaybay, Baaabay and began to grind

toward the first row and though everyone laughed
(our performance becoming a burlesque comedy
routine) I knew we’d lose, cursed by the ghosts

of Black History Month Decency for going bare backed,
and I was cursed twice, really, (the whole no shirt thing
was my idea in the first place) since X, the jilted lover

of my valentine, was waiting for me in the parking lot
and had in fact been in the audience watching me
defile what probably for him was a very important day

(It was February 14th), and I’m sure he was seeing red
when I too gave up on the Black National Anthem,
and began to gyrate for the audience like my roommate.

ROOT

My parents would have had me believe
there was no such thing as race
there in the wild backyard, our knees black
with store-bought grass and dirt,
black as the soil of pastures or of orchards
grown above graves. We clawed free
the stones and filled their beds with soil
and covered the soil with sod
as if we owned the earth.
We worked into the edge of darkness
and rose in the edge of darkness
until everything came from the dirt.
We clawed free the moss and brambles,
the colonies of crab-weed, the thorns
patrolling stems and I liked it then:
the mute duty that tightened my parents’
backs as if they meant to work
the devil from his den. Rock and spore
and scraps of leaf; wild bouquets withered
in bags by the road, cast from the ground
we broke. We scrubbed the patio,
we raked the cross hatch of pine needles,
we soaked the ant-cathedrals in gas.
I found an axe blade beneath an untamed hedge,
its edge too dull to sever vine and half expected
to find a jawbone scabbed with mud,
because no one told me what happened
to the whites who’d owned the house.
No one spoke of the color that curled
around our tools or of the neighbors
who knew our name before we knew theirs.
Sometimes they were almost visible,
clean as fence posts in porch light;
their houses burning with wonder,
their hammocks drunk with wind.
When I dreamed, I dreamed of them
and believed they dreamed of us
and believed we were made of dirt or shadows:
something not held or given, irredeemable, inexact,
all of us asking what it means to be black . . .
I have never wanted another life, but I know the story
of pursuit: the dream of a gate standing open,
a grill and folding chairs, a new yard boxed in light.

I. MJ FAN LETTER

Dear K.O.P., for the first dozen years of my life
I never looked at myself. I believed mirrors
bore no true social significance partly because
they hung on walls. Convinced, then
in the last thin quarter of the century,
that I was a colorless American boy without detail
perhaps I should confess my very first brush with love
involved a white girl and empty dryer box.
I smelled, if I recall, the scent of damp cardboard,
which was a scent not altogether unlike my father’s
olive green Army-issue boot socks, and so it was
that as I and my little cob-webbed nymph
(as I have thought of her ever since) attempted
to make a singular glistening smile, I thought again
and again that my father was walking barefoot
nearby with a boot in each fist. I felt
the ominous pre-tingling a soldier feels
when he waits in a trench at the start of a great war
though that was not a year of war, if you recall,
but a year of myriad insignificant misdemeanors
and dumb disputes. I thought too, that the girl
had dropped down into my arms from a nest
of the July, late afternoon darkness blooming
in the upper corner of the box because her hair
danced and dangled across my brown wobbling head
like something made in the belly of a spider,
and I half wondered then when I would learn
what magic it was that gave some creatures the power
to spin a thread almost thinner than light. I decided
I’d ask my father later when I sat on his chest
full of sprawling powder-white women,
and removed his boots and then his socks,
but of course I didn’t, having been struck dumb
by something (The color or length of his toes,
the tiny grid pattern the socks left on his ankles?).
It doesn’t matter what, since any boy who spends
an afternoon with a girl in a box is prone to forget
his questions. I too had a bizarre über-hunger
for companionship and have gone on having it,
as I presume you have, ever since. When I pressed
my palm against the girl’s back, I felt first,
the impression of her skin inside the white blouse,
and then the jagged bones of her spine
and I thought of the tiny, tiny spines
in all the animals inside and around the box
when we found it there at the edge of the park.
The stray dogs had spines shaped like my father’s
belt, the squirrels and field mice had spines
shaped like the smallest limbs of the saplings;
I thought briefly of grasshopper and ant bodies
before considering the spinelessness of the earth-
worms uncoiling in the mud beneath the box.
Mostly I learned what I know of myself
by holding my tongue still and I’m wondering
how it was with you? Anyone can go back
to the summers that were clear as water,
and I’m assuming you too sat at opened windows
and listened to the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t say
yet what it was you and I were waiting for, Cousin,
but I’ll say it never arrived.

II. A FEW RUMORS CONCERNING MR. POTATO HEAD

Bet in his diary there are blueprints of his faces. Yep, and a little arrow pointing to where his eyeball rolled from the page. Yep, and bounced once on the floor. Bet a diamond glistens in the ear floating in the mason jar on his desk. Bet his collar-bone is made of gold. Bet he’s never heard of Mary Shelley—Hell, bet he can only read sheet music! God-damn, Brother, Prince just changed his name! Doctors say latex is ageless. Doctors say the body is nothing but money. Bet his tongue quivers in a pillbox. Bet his tongue is shy, in debt, and depressed. Bet he sings: Praise be to Edison’s lightbulb and the scalpel! Bet he sings: Praise be to the nursemaid who sells her womb! Bet he sings: Praise be to hyperrealism, hypodermics, John Merrick and the poise of mannequins! Bet it’ll be a closed casket in the end. And enough flowers to cover Texas. And a dozen biographies in the first month! Yep, bet no one finds the diary. Bet no one finds the face.

III. OMNIPOP, 1982

Little things like pants get a mind of their own. They get their legs and then their waistband and then the pants begin to run in place. Little things like pants extend the song and fill it with mirrors and glitter. The pants shrink and turn to shrieks. Smaller and smaller, the pants shriek and shrink until they can fit inside other pants, until they can fit the legs of a chimp and then the fingers of a hand—the little pants remember childhood and their longing turns them into panting, the sound a doll makes. The world needs miniature pants. Bless the little pants.

IV. RSVP

Dear K.O.P., this is not a letter
from one of the white girls you met
backstage in Columbus or Lincoln, but from me—
your friend, pretending to be a white girl
in the hope that this time you might reply.
Oh, to be in the head of a pretty white girl!
It’s nearly impossible even for a black boy
raised late in the era of integrated cafeterias,
Mtv and soap operas. By now your experiment
must be nearing its sad inevitable conclusion.
Are you asking yourself: Am I the beginning
of beauty or am I the end? I’m fairly sure
that’s not something white girls ask themselves,
though it’s something everyone wonders
about them. Africans, Asians, Martians, Apes—
they love them some white girls and you
have to wonder: is it all the PR (from Helen
of Troy to Mary Christ to your Elizabeth Taylor)?

What’s the deal with you and Elizabeth?
What’s the deal with you and Diana,
the Butch Diva, for that matter?
Once you could have had the love of anyone.
I can still remember your hyper-glow socks
and fly tuxedo. Sometimes my thoughts drift
to Billie Jean, that condemned anonymous woman.
What ever happened to her and that baby?What’s a brother got to do to get an answer,
Brother? If by chance, this is the first of my letters
you are reading (I’ve written dozens
over the years), let me say again
that I understand a man’s hunger for company.
When I moved North and phoned home
to tell my momma I’d fallen in love,
she asked me if the girl was white and I snapped,
“No Ma, she looks like you!”
That’s got to be one of the most outrageous
(maybe most reasonable) questions,
my mother has ever asked me . . .
“Take love where you find it,” “Water is the color
of what holds it,” and all that.
What does your mother think of your hair
and lipstick? Of all the girls’ noses
pressed at your limo window in 1982,
which did she most adore?

THE BLUE BARAKA

We go waaaaay back, America.
Like mutts in the bed of a pickup.
Like righteous indignations.
Like riotous ignitions. Like far right-
wing indicators blinking
white&black, white&black, white&black—
They don’t share our values, you say.
I gave you my life / you gave me
my life, America. Some of us fog
up the grapes and some of us vomit
money. Some of us bag boys. Some of us
Lerois, some of us Charlie too Browns
too. Some of us black-eyed, brown-
eyed idlers. Some of us be best friends
or fried fiends, but all of us be
floundering interiors, be all these things
at once, America. Why you be?
Why you be decked in suits
of metal? Indefatigable. Empty
fat. Inflatable. Laughable and lost.
Why you be funkying up the holy waters
and memorizing the same Biblical bullshit?
He shall separate us one from the other,
as a shepherd divideth his sheep, you say.
He shall divideth the chain from the gang,
divideth the pepper from the pepper-spray,
you say. You say: They don’t share
our values. America, how you talk
with such little lips? How you sleep
with such little rhythm?
How you live with such little music?
You be your own ship at sea.
You be your own shadow off course,

the last hour, the shroud of transgressions. You be a white, blue and ready-made utopia for some; you be over-cooked and crooked, a scythe of bite marks, an odor of orders for others.

THE BLUE BORGES

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