The World Is Round: Poems

Metallurgy

93 meTallurGy for Cassandra Wilson She’s the one who won’t leave us. She sings and cobwebs are strung like salve, like liniment laced, every note forging iron. Her low sulfur notes swim in a buttered brine. Her reddened mouth parachutes around leaping Africans, resuscitating the butter-bean breath of Black boys. She keeps bringing up the past like it’s a throat, with a muddy Mississippi fish bone stuck crossways. At her Marian Anderson table we always eat our fill. She opens like a furnace (all southern), walks us to the flame (all polite), refuses to enter the pretty waters of the melody without the rest of the scorched story in tow. She sees to the keeping of the shells, studies the motions of Black mermaids draped in crepe myrtle, waist high in red-dirt octaves. She learns it back to us by way of the highway of the ear. 94 Before the end of the song we check our wrists, we lick our lips, we taste ankle iron. She’s the one who won’t abandon. On stage, under lights, she’s slipping through the thicket again, untying Grandmama’s hands, every gnarled throat in the room straightens, finally free of scuppernong, wisteria. She enters the room and a valley of blackbirds takes off, the furnace opens and closes, all the copper in us turns toward the magnet of her breath. Every penny we’ve ever saved in mason jars, for the ritual closing of the eyes, rattles. Her coral-indigo humming raises adolescent cousins full-term, pouring salt into the historical wound. When her eyes close on the clef of treble, when her head goes back past the beginning of hypnosis, she is seeing things again. The Atlantic Ocean’s greatest slaughter is scribbled beneath her lids in scarred black codes. With or without guitar she can pluck you. 95 She enters counterclockwise all the while in ring shout time Slipping slew-footed mildly like a monk, round and round the floor until gold is discovered in the pan of her feet. In half notes she flutters. She’s the one who won’t leave us. A girl from Jackson, from where daughters in concert are raised only once, given African guitars, then taught the iron songs, instead of bedtime stories, then set upon the world. Songs that tell how never to leave, how never to leave us, how never to leave well enough alone. ...