Читать книгу Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa - Страница 10

Early Uncollected

Mississippi John Hurt

Now the disorder of your words

makes some lavender sense

a knife-edge of seeing.

Birds meditate on powerlines

over Red Rocks, quills

ravel into a drift of muscle,

& your fingers swear

they’d die if they couldn’t

touch a guitar. Some surprise

bursts under your breath

boils of honey.

Langston Hughes

Those days when Jesse B.

Semple was quick to say,

“You can take the boy

outta the country …”

Joplin, Lawrence, Lincoln,

all left watermarks: an eye

of habit from turning up hems

& talking at the bottom of blue.

Agate polished itself

as this word weaver

groped for a foothold

in the boneyard,

watching hypnotic bird

voices condense in spoons.

A greenhorn among zoot-suited

swingers who danced with skirts

lost in a glare of horns

as long chains flowed out of empty pockets.

Blue Tonality

No, not Sprung Rhythm.

That guy with Thunder

Smith on Gold Star

who said, “I was born with the blues.”

After mile-long cotton rows

& Blind Lemon Jefferson

at The Rainbow,

he’d touch the strings

& know every note in the groin.

Catgut & a diamond needle

cut grooves in race records—

the flatted thirds, twelve

bars of flesh idiom.

De Síntoma Profundo

We inherited more than body language.

Pantomimic ghost flowers & sones:

our hands tied through gray weather

refuse to salute treadmill foremen.

Some waltz backwards off bridges,

& others sleepwalk to Solzhenitsyn’s

State Department communiqué.

My mind’s on Americus,

Georgia. Caught up in paperwork

of murder & audio surveillance,

weapons experts tread air

in oxblood Bostonians.

—for Nicolas Guillen

Lover

A turning away from flowers.

A cutting out of

stone understands, naked

before the sculptor.

I watch you down Telegraph Avenue

till you sprout into a quivering

song color.

But I hope you fall

from your high horse

& break your damn neck.

Reminiscence

I had brainphotos

of riding you down into music.

I tried to kiss you back then,

but didn’t know the sweet punishment

of a tongue inside another voice.

You were a tree breaking with mangoes,

bent toward deeper earth,

& ran out into the world

before me. Songs floated ahead

like comic-strip balloons

where they could breathe hard

& blow dreams apart.

The green light kept going

beyond Blueberry Hill.

Bandages of silence

didn’t conceal unsolved crimes,

& I deserted my voice crawling

over cobblestone.

My ribcage a harp

for many fingers.

I’ve seen overturned deathcarts

with their wheels churning

Guadalajara mornings,

but your face will always be

a private country.

Waiting for a Tree Through a Window

The coffeepot percolates,

a dying man’s last breath.

Alone at this onyx window

I’ve seen Balanced Rock

perched on the brink of midnight.

Hard times wrestle water up hills,

mineshafts worked down to daybreak.

At this window, I’ve witnessed

knowledge of hyacinth & burdock,

how night snow cascades & out of nowhere

praise flashes like bobwhites

out of dead grass.

I want to tell them, when it comes,

not to question my death,

the moon will have its say.

The Lamp Carrier

He swings his lamp into a hovel,

a circle of vermillion.

Hunger rushes forward.

He steps back, but the raw odor

reaches out & hugs him.

Someone whispers,

“Our lives fallen angels.

Songs stolen from the mouths

of our children, worrybeads

snatched from dead fingers.”

Another voice from a year

of darkness says, “Ask Captain Nobones—

the one with hemlock in his lapel,

who always has the flamenco dancer,

Maria, on his arm.” The lamp

shimmies up, out of the hole

in the floor of the summer night,

& disappears in eucalyptus scent.

The Life & Times of Billy Boy

His mother would sigh,

“God giveth & He taketh.

My dear child of a dog’s luck.

A precious thorn works

deeper into my side.”

When Billy Boy was seven

he didn’t know the sound of his name,

like talking to an oak.

He’d fall in constant love

with ravens & bluejays,

then urge their perch

on the crowns of scarecrows,

thinking of himself

as a conclusion

of their wings.

A House of Snow

A woman stepped out of no-

where, humpbacked, struggling

with the moon. She asked me if

I was lonely, if I was happy.

Before I could lie, she said,

“In many ways, you remind me

of what’s-his-name, who sees poetry

in the leaf. In the ugliest,

smallest thing. He says katydids

influence tongues. His hands are

roots, his song a wolf’s lost

in a cloud of migratory birds.”

Recital of Water Over Stones

We wait to see you nail

your voice to the floor.

You stand in a doorway

talking clothes off dreams.

The groupie in the front row

wears lavender stockings,

& knows Blue Nun & Panama Red.

She stares at the glass ceiling

of crimson birds,

as if you hide among rafters.

You step up to the podium,

drag on a cigarette, touch

the half-dead microphone,

& jazz leaps into your mouth.

It sounds like you’ve lived

dog days & slept in a hollowed log,

as you lead us through orange

groves, exposing white bones

& drums buried under dirt.

—for Robert Creeley

The Dog’s Theology

He walks ahead

of the man. His

chain drags on the ground,

clanking a song of dark colors

in the acid air. He

knows where he’s going;

echoing blood cells

in the man’s head,

his imagination a quail

among dirty words.

They Say in Yellow Jacket

The mind’s anchored to a stone.

Dandelion wine grows bittersweet

in the musty cellars. The old

beat-up Buick’s a buffalo,

drinking cries of coyotes

as it stumbles toward a beginning.

The land eats itself, a half-mile

into the heart. Sage blooms in the heads

of Billy the Kid & Jesse James.

I hope the road hurries to Denver.

Here, even the gully-brown jackrabbit

gets a dirty deal. Buntings lay low

among the rocks where tumbleweed

stakes claim. Any moment the sky

could leap open as the body

settles into itself like a stone

tossed into a lake. You’re safe

with knives & Front Range daybreak.

I’m spellbound by the mountains,

a woman dropping her last veil.

When Men Can’t Trust Hands with Wood

You can pull off back roads

astonished with honeysuckle

& Virginia rails in marsh grass.

In Oven Fork, they know how to witch

for water deep as stars underground.

Here, rough men know how

to handle iron & die hard

in blue vaults of racial memory.

Under villanelles of pleated dresses

women forget flesh. In Black Mountain

Coleman headlanterns tunnel through

the mole’s tombed season.

Birthday Song

The sharecropper’s wife

stands in unharvested

stillness. Her womb

turned inside out by God’s

grief. She kneels beside

a newly-dug bodyhole,

& her man hands her

the black handkerchief.

Legacy

Suck dove meat from the bones,

tallyho around the electric fence

of this guardhouse.

Pin medals to chests. Our shadows

sleep in the ground, old combat boots

laced on the feet of the dead.

For as long as I can remember

men have sewn their tongues

to the roofs of their mouths.

Eye Witness

I want to forget everything.

I want to pull the venetian blinds

& extinguish the lights. Sometimes

six high-stepping boots

emerge from the sumac thicket

toward this unlit house. Six

black boots kick at my front door

till a vase of periwinkles overturns

& rolls under the bed.

A spray of glass covers

the middle of next year.

A hunting knife arcs the air.

I’m a smashed violin covered with dust,

& rise to drip red leaves down streets.

Unnatural Deaths

Foster child of ragweed,

can you hear grain

silos opening in the night?

Where the sun’s a dirt farmer’s

good-luck timepiece,

yucca drips white

& the afternoon forecasts

irony. Dust-bowl

people disappear walking

toward rain, in August

thickets of magenta thistle.

When you enter the town

voices of children will stone you

till your clothes are rags.

Mr. Ditch Commissioner

of La Acequia Del Llano,

did you know a gopher hole

can swallow a man?

A Different Story

Teenyboppers crowd No Exit.

Lep Zeppelin & illegal

shadows. I hate words

burning twist lemon menthol 100s.

No, nothing I say can stop them

from splitting themselves open

like those honeydew melons

I saw last summer

driving the midwest.

They clap hands & laugh

like Sam River’s sax,

dancing the rose’s perfect vernacular

as they push their lives into streets

on the tongues of men.

One-Breath Song

you are the third term

carried to the fourth power of numbers

two steps overlooked inbetween

colors of night-burning sky

a priori light blue of your dress

our faces everything except

against odds of self-discovery

we find our bodies locked

together in a room of breath

threefold at the rotting threshold

divided into ontogenetic questions

a fluke of radio waves in the storm

the song that uses up our lives.

Frontal Lobe Postscript

God’s love is busy with the trees.

Arch-mechanic of electrical sky,

blood-red tree of knowledge, ichnology,

witch hazel, mid-May. I think of Bob,

with his “little piece of string & sharp

stone,” over at Minnie’s Can-Do Club,

as if the go-go dancer in her cage cares

who knows injustice’s oblique cape.

Sagittarius Approaching Thirty-Five

Yes, you’re still a little eccentric

around the velvet edges of your voice.

Your martini eyes say you wish you could

stop Cherokee Creek behind the unpainted house

you were born in. Boards drop off like slabs

of digital ice. The mortar of the doorsteps

cracks with green flames. You’re crouched

in a corner, crying because your face plays

the girl who returns summers to watch the yard

swell with wildflowers. The iron signpost,

an arm holding the nameplate

almost corroded away.

Cubism

Deep-eyed painter through black windows

Across night

Mountain rain

Drips blue

Cezanne thinking Six triangles of sun

Insinuations

Around from Kentucky Fried Chicken

at Liberty Belle, I met someone

who looked like somebody’s dream.

We talked about the obsequy

behind John Berryman’s eyes,

about how we loved

reading The Voice in bed

while sipping Southern Comfort.

She showed me where some bastard

kicked his baby out of her.

We said we didn’t know why

we loved walking in the rain

till everything disappeared,

but knew why Eric Dolphy

pried the lids off skulls.

Loneliness

New Mexico peels off

plum skin.

A night-blooming cereus

leans against an adjacent building

like the town’s drunk.

Morning swells in my brain

till my fingers retrace a woman

on the air. We all use our hands

for something, against something.

The Orange Pekoe taste of her

stays, even after a brown bottle

wraps my voice in cerecloth.

Again, I find myself

watching the old silversmith

work plains of buffalo

from his head. I return

to my rented room,

put a bullet into the chamber

& snap the trigger four times.

The sun’s now on the shoulder

of an Indian woman walking into

distance filled with dirt trees.

I go to the pay phone again

outside El Triumpho Tamales,

& Ray Charles cries from a car

speeding past.