Poetry

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. —Paul Valéry   The hatred goes back for centuries, everyone says,        a tradition as old                     as making wine, weaving rugs, playing flutes.          My father remarks              he would have expected it from the Croats                     who colluded with Hitler,        but…

It descends with the Holy Spirit over your face, breasts, legs, draping the flesh in modesty, a falling curtain of grace, and you: an empty dress-shape with a scapular, a cincture, and a veil, receptacle of God’s will.             Unless, of course, your body is a swamp of desire, your heart a simmering kettle, its…

for To Nhuan Vy We hold our glasses out, then drink. Two years since the American soldier returned, told how he’d turned his Claymores facing up that night: so the warning, “This side to the enemy,” pointed to the sky. His one small act of protest in the war. He never knew at midnight, a…

We were excited at the motel when the B.B. King tour bus pulled in but then my mother said “Where did all these colored come from?” She’s eighty-five. That’s how it is in Ohio. No it’s not, that’s how it is in us, that’s why thirty-five years ago in my first year at Cornell we…

O Lord my God, in thee do I put my trust. Save me from them that pursue me and deliver me, Lest they tear my soul like a lion. i. The torment of voices: When are you going to get . . . When are you going to be . . . Who will you…

Defending you, my country, hurts My eyes. I see the drums, the glory, The marching through the gory, Unthinkable mud of soldiers’ guts And opened hearts: I want to serve. I join the military, Somehow knowing that I’ll never marry. The barracks’ silence as I shave Is secretive and full of cocks. I think to…

But since I’ve written just this one poem About being black, having a black body, I know that they have won—whoever they are. And I know what it is like to wish for death. Not the way people in poems do, But the way successful suicides do—or did.

To every morning reach for the wire whisk, the yellow bag of sugar above her head on the top shelf next to dried beans. And the eggs of Rhode Island Reds that maybe were how she felt mornings before putting on her face. She was someone else making pancakes blank and plain who could crack…

The storm breaks leaving the limbs far away from being what happened, the world, like this. Wind still refuses to choose between the plumes of grasses and the roofs of the big houses. The agony of nails prying loose. The swing unhinged. The fleshy roots of an ash exposed like the paintings of Death embracing…