The Races of America

The rain is a legend, a teacher,A temple in my hear,A source of pride to the tides, brackish waters,To the fitful and eely prophetsComing with their childrenFrom the lands of the desert and iceTo the black fleets, scissors and steel of America.I have taken on another man's disease,His violence, his solitude, his peculiar guilt,Wrapping myself in the black envelope of his empathy.Flowers nest togetherLike the opened mouths of baby birds.Rivers, muddy and malicious,Come together with their soiled hands.There is a mineral language, fissure-like and breeding,Beyond my understandingFeeding at the roots and thornsTurning at the coil of the world.My blood is a dark wireHolding together the wandering races of America.Black, Brown and White come together,A bowl of awkward flowers, polished rocks,Gathering fire, falling in sacrifice,Plunging a stupendous waterfall,Foaming, hissing, grinding on stones,The bulwark of trees,Over moss-covered boulders, immense organs,Spreading out, alluvial, incandescent,A fan of villages and templesAcross the firmament and continent,Through the common nervework of muscles and veins.Angry stallions, they came pulling a brutal chariotThrough the water, through the air,With chairs and spirits. Mixing gunpowder and arrowheads they cameThe fury of races playing outIn river mouths, gullies, deep places in the earWhere the femurs cracked,Vermilion splashing in projectile blood,Bodies of children burned, curling like liver under a flameThen swelling on the floor.Rapes in the dungeons, laughter, hair,Shark fodder trailing in entrails on the seas behind the warping watersFrom Jakin, Agoue, Badagry.The broken breastbone and heartGouged out 'the door of no return' to seawind,Salt and distended bowels belchingThrough the mouth of the scorched stump,The smoking skull of Elmina castle.

Ii

Then came the rain,The rain in the hollowed-out belly of the ships;Vomit, maggots, whips and chains.Back and forthFor weeks in the darkness, the nails, the Maafa,Before the exchange in Rio, Jamestown, Haiti;April and knucklebones unloaded on the docks.Then flies and wood ants gathering by the blood.Blood on the scaffolds, blood in the marketplace.Blood on the planks mingled with bile and shit.Blood in the mosquitoes,In the far-flung language of the northern tribes.With the rum and the money,Blood running in the barns, the bedrooms,The color-castes stacking up in the rising new cities and states.Hidden kingdoms in the interior filled with runaways and slaves.On scavenging huntsThe anaconda, giant and smooth,Green as emerald, glidedThrough the dark driving the slaves of slavesRunning from empires lost back in the long grass.Deeper and deeper they went into the terrain of iron woods,Topaz, brown and vociferous waters,Then upland to rivers and cliffs,Past mummified remainsUp into the ash and puma mountains.Through citadels, burnt fields,Serpent villages 'of no return,'To cities of men walking the walkways,The hidden corridors between the stars,Still blinder to the soul of the otherThan the meaning behind tree bark, insects,The smaller traffic of dogs and fleas.Then the rain at death carried their voicesTo the northern faces of the Mississippi and Platte.In the cycle of circles and transmigrating arcsApache, Iroquois, Shoshone, and CayenneTouched back to the Australoid face of their fathers.Faces under limestone, below stalactite, stalagmite,Faces in blue stones and flint,In the sinew of buffalo and birch,In the moody fires of pitchblende, red oak,Submerged, lost,Under piles of bones, antlers and vegetable starch.

Iii

A comet's tail fissures the air of the upper earth,Volcanoes grumble in the belly of stones,Black fog climbs up the valley of a river,A seaport seizuresOn the waters and great rocks.Dolphins of an older, deeper incarnation watch. From the Dog Star circling light years awaySouls are castLike shimmering stones to earthThrough the midnight sky of obsidian and glass.Trapped, frozen in a spasm of timeThey comeRolled...