Rice: Poems

Yellow Jaundice

10 Yellow Jaundice After the horizon of my mother’s eyes and my father’s pinkish proudest first girl smile I must have seen trees first There in a semicircle 5 3 hundred year old live oaks drench draped in hot august moss in the beige sandy yard where nothing else grew no grass just sand and eventually me 5 3 hundred year old live oaks on racepath avenue southern coastal carolina nineteen hundred and fifty-seven When papa pulled the black valiant all the way up to the house porch so she wouldn’t have far to walk nor yellow-jaundiced new me much sun to feel 11 I was home for the first time riding high bone in mama’s lap Long before vertical or horizontal vision I could see in the round my mother’s navel opening as milky global eye Still I love a circled-up window still I see it round first the bending circling trees catch me before anything From my first days this madagascan nose pointed for the atlantic-african sea like babylips poking out hungry for the milky nipple I could hear calling spitting out the ancestor crabs from my incubating window As I grew these other eyes and could finally look above and below me after His and Her face that I shall always know best I surely must have high-glimpsed these ones first 5 3 hundred year old live oaks baobab standing in a wide-arcing circle a family of old wood standing shoulder to shoulder to shoulder at different sky heights 12 their feet immemorial stuck in seashell socks in beige and white sand where nothing else grew but eventually me I walk through and sleep in that village of woody bones the days and nights of childhood still deeply rooted there I hear their splintered venerable chanting and step across the snake roots that buckled up and ran from out of the ground and cycloned scars around my legs like age rings on top my skin 5 3 hundred year old live oaks Sometimes I am still there waiting for mother to get out of the car pushing for her to get up out of the car I want to look out again for the first time and claim my horizontal vision my vertical view and walk that village path of old trees that stood calling for me so long to be home for the first time My how they must have sung tree songs for me the first time she put me down and watched me take my first steps in that wavy ocean soil 13 Could she have cautioned about the snake roots that would from then on be in my way that buckled up and ran out of the ground all over the yard 5 3 hundred year old live oaks Or would she simply push me from the dock armored in a cowrie-shell ship my pockets full of everything I would ever need and wave me well She did not know even then as I stumbled back to the hamper of her arms even as I fell into my first bruises but rose again to the venerable wooden cheers and chanting my tiny lips streaming cranberry my coming-in tooth crooked and gapped for life my tiny face wearing one complete coat of sand not as mask but mussel She did not know as she let me fall and watched me rise this rising up this falling back this roundness would be my life’s work first taught to me by her last written and witnessed by wood ...