Читать книгу Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa - Страница 11

Dedications & Other Darkhorses

Returning the Borrowed Road

The hard white land

calls you back across

iron months to Missoula,

overtaken in Colorado’s slow mountains

among gray cloud horses.

Lines, muscles, the heart’s

great naked timbers, swing

music. You said, Get away

from the poem. You’re too close.

Now, I let each stone

seek its new mouth.

In Boulder, your first word

homage, a lifetime of birds

gone wild with brightness,

like bundled hayfields.

That day when you entered

the room, we mistook you

for a man who works

a mile down in the ground.

—for Richard Hugo

Chair Gallows

Beating wind with a stick.

Riding herd on the human spirit.

It’s how a man slips his head into a noose

& watches the easy weight of gods pull down

on his legs. I hope this is just another lie,

just another typo in a newspaper headline.

But I know war criminals

live longer than men lost between railroad tracks

& crossroad blues, with twelve strings

two days out of hock.

I’ve seen in women’s eyes

men who swallow themselves in mirrors.

—memory of Phil Ochs

Allegorical Seduction

I am piled up so high

in your walk, I

slide down a chute of years.

Touch me, mountains

rise, & the pleasure

tears us into a song.

Quicksilver skies, these birds

over The Four Corners

down through Gallup & Window Rock

catch fire in clouds.

No god tells them

different. No hand

disclaims our closing

distance, as doors open

under the sea.

—for Linda G.

Under House Arrest

I won’t crawl into

your cathedral of ashes

& gopherwood to buy an hour

digging my grave. Nightsticks

have bashed every drumhead,

but in the Anlo of my bones

I’ll fight till the grave-

digger throws dirt in my face.

Listen, big man around town,

hear my silence. Tom-toms

rattle across indigo hills,

& my tongue’s heavy as a gold piece.

One grunt of wisdom

remains. But Yemanja

knows how to heal

this song, dancing naked

in my brain. I gaze all night

at the moon through a crack

in the wall, till nothing

rises & sinks back on its haunches

into damp secret earth.

—for Kofi Awoonor

Translating Footsteps

She says Go fuck yourself

when I say Good-bye & good luck

with potted plants

under a granite moon.

A hand reaches from behind

to slash my throat.

Some things refuse translation:

the way I place my hands under

red silk to hear

a thin-skinned drum;

language of growing grass;

tombed treaties forgotten like lamps

left to burn out in a ghost town.

Each pause a clock inside stone …

digital, monumental as a grain

of wheat. Translate this

mojo song, footsteps

in a midnight hallway.

My doors enter from the sidestreet,

my windows painted basement black,

my mouth kisses the blues harp,

my heart hides like notes

locked in a cedar chest.

Urban Renewal

The sun slides down behind brick dust,

today’s angle of life. Everything

melts, even when backbones

are I-beams braced for impact.

Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone

shaped into dry air

white soundsystem of loose metal

under every footstep. Wrecking crews,

men unable to catch sparrows without breaking

wings into splinters. Blues-horn

mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing

but the white odor of absence.

The big iron ball

swings, keeping time

to pigeons cooing in eaves

as black feathers

float on to blueprint

parking lots.

Magpies

In Magpie Hollow thorns

scratch a cow’s hide

in a snowfield. But

what’s a nick where iron

hissed a circle around an X?

This inky swarm

tries to peck its way

into a cage through snowy air,

into open wounds.

They dive for the eyes

of the uninfected, spreading

affliction, rise

& circle back

like a blaze of locust,

the sky falling to the ground.

The Tongue Is

xeroxed on brainmatter.

Grid-squares of words spread

like dirty oil over a lake.

The tongue even lies to itself,

gathering wildfire for songs of gibe.

Malcontented clamor, swish of reeds.

Slow, erratic, memory’s loose

grain goes deep as water

in the savage green of oleander.

The tongue skips a beat, link of truth …

a chain running off a blue bicycle.

It starts like the slow knocking

in a radiator’s rusty belly.

I enter my guilty plea

dry as the tongue of a beggar’s

unlaced shoe. The tongue labors,

a victrola in the mad mouth-hole

of 3 A.M. sorrow.

Ten Speeds

A deer in the body

bends into a kaleidoscopic hurrah

of bellbirds let go.

Imported ten speeds

zoom past like a shoal

of women struggling

against the aluminum day

to get out of their clothes.

The same wind that seeds

the valley with nasturtium

rattles every door & window,

& tangles in calico.

She jabs thigh-flashes

into the heart, riding away

with the sun on her shoulder.

(E)Motion

The oldest wheel, the setting sun

carries this world

seaward on its back.

Piece by piece. Star

by star, & stone

by stone it goes.

The wheel grunts

& labors under

night’s black shoulders.

I cannot stand for another letdown

to crawl into my life

thin as a half-cracked egg.

Hey! wherever you’ve been

I’ve been there with my tongue

in your red mouth.

Observatory

Three fat flies copulate

on the lip of my coffee cup.

Too many damn worlds

of possibilities. Everything

isn’t to be known

or divided into itself

by enigma’s big eyes,

their heads glassy-black

space helmets.