Bringing the Shovel Down

Say It

39 Say It If I told you we were slapping the beat to some Barry White jam crooning from the boombox and that every single one of us at one point or another jumped up to shake what shook on us and there were lines of us in step and a loon in every one of our mouths who knew and one of us in his pressed shirt dancing his dead father’s hunchbacked smooth and another singing back up like hers and another shaking his head no but meaning yes, oh yes—and if I told you the proprietor of this roti joint dragged his wife from the kitchen where she was busy currying chana for the best doubles in Brooklyn so she too might witness this unabashed racket, this stampede of glee and goof, this clan of black clad—and if I told you today we laid down one too young to lay down: praise the body its miraculous stutter and thrum. Praise its slosh and drag and drone and every particulate diving toward the dirt. The rampant heart its last kick and holler. The blood clot’s last long swim to the lung. Praise the lung its last whistle, and the kidney’s no more— say this; say praise the machine hiss your father became and the quick way he gave it up; say praise the liver’s dread swell. Say it again. Say it with your heart and neck and lent throat gaped and flayed to the sky. Say it covering someone’s hand with yours, straightening your tie. Say it gay pages-2.indd 39 10/18/10 11:20 AM 40 to the earth’s fat mouth. Say it the way you can turn on your heel to spark fire and make your limber hip twist like a lesser storm, or the way there is a storm between your two good hips which are good good music if you listen; say it in your polished shoes, to the organist say it too; praise the heart its rivers and each rope twisted in the body, and every bird housed in the body: vulture, gull, raven, jackrabbit, cask wick and flame a bird too; say praise to flame a bird too; praise to the nerve endings in your teeth, and to your tongue like a blind man’s hand reading her teeth, and the tongue inside the eyes, and the nose in the tongue and the heart in the tongue; say praise to salt, tear, stain, and skin ripped apart like a kite flipping in the wind, praise the rip in the kite and the geese flying through it, praise the wings you swore you had when you were six years old and the wings that remain today; praise every flower you never smelled and every dog you never kissed, and the skinny farmer at the market with bad teeth who gave you his last cantaloupe and peppers and snap peas who you never kissed, praise the handful of freckles gay pages-2.indd 40 10/18/10 11:20 AM 41 dashed across your father’s face that you never kissed until he would not wake again; say it; say it again; say praise the sunlight trapped on your father’s face and the body’s slapdash racket slipping away if you want to or not clean the dirt from your teeth and the glass from your fists if you want to or not tie both your shoes and fix your suspenders and praise the heart inside the heart cracking its shackles, its thunderclap shrug, its two thousand dolphins waving goodbye. Praise, every day, the two thousand dolphins waving goodbye. Shaking off our hearts and waving goodbye. gay pages-2.indd 41 10/18/10 11:20 AM ...