Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa

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