Joe Louis’s Fist

1.After the sun rose into rust between gravel and horizon,after the scent of you oxidized the steel of my car goinginto the lidocaine of the morning air as the highway slid

into northeast Detroit past Chill & Mingle,I did a double-take and took a wrong turn at Rim Repair.(Long ago my father said I should see the fist).

No one spoke Swahili on 12th Street, still rubbleafter the blind pigs folded up.It was a cliché of the image of itself but it was, it was

like nothing, the vacant burned-out bungalows, car parts, metal scrapsarson jobs, abandoned homes, barbed wire playgrounds,shacks pummeled along Six Mile Road — derelict since ’67.

2.My father said when Louis won, the radio static was a waveof sound that stayed all night like the riots blocks away in Harlem,as the scent of lilac and gin wafted down Broadway to his window

across from the Columbia gates where the sounds ofFletcher Henderson and Dizzy buzzed the air,where the mock Nazi salutes were shadows over the

granite lions and snake-dancing, and car hornsbanged the tar and busted windshields,even coffee shops south of 116th were looted.

3.It came back in fragments — through the gauzeof the summer of love, through Lucy in the Skyand other amnesias; streets of burnt-out buildings,

paratroopers bivouacked in high schools with gas and bayonets.By 6 a.m. July 23 national guards were walkingin the rain of black cinder and pillars of smoke —

a black body hanging from a fence of an auto part yard,whisky-faced boys shooting through the fireas torn bags of loot trailed the streets.

Prostitutes used pool cues to defend themselves.Booze and cartridge smoke ate their skin.One trooper said it looked like Berlin in ’45.

4.Samson, David, and Elijah in one left hookmy father said, (6/22/38) upbraided Neville Chamberlainliberated Austria and Sudetenland

knocked the lights out in Berlin —sent Polish Jews into the boulevardsfor one night of phantasmal liberation.

Because Hitler banned jazz, because Black Moses ledcrowds and crowds to the marvelous, inscrutable, overwhelmingbalked dreams of revenge, millions seeped out of doorways, alleys, tenements —

dreaming of the diamond pots, of Chrysler heaven,the golden girls of Hollywood and Shirley Templewho rubbed some salt into his hands for luck.

Untermensch from Alabama —sucker for the right hand — the other side of Hailee Saliseeblack men howled to him from their electric chairs.

5.When I drove past Berry Gordy Jr. Boulevardand the Hitsville USA sign on the studio-house,the lights were out and I could only

imagine the snake pit where Smokey Robinsonspun into vinyl, where “Heat Wave”came as sweet blackmail in the beach air of ’64,

where the Funkbrothers and Martha Reevestook the mini opera and dumped it on its head.

By the time I hit Jefferson and Woodwardthe sun was glaring on the high windows.and then it hit me — spinning the light —

horizontal two-foot arm smashing the bluethrough the empty pyramid holding it upin the glare of skyscraper glass: molten

bronze-hand, hypotenuse of history,displaced knuckles —

the smooth-casting over the gouged-out wounds —the naked, beloved, half-known forms.