Book Review

I.

Amid the whir of estrogen,
my finger marking the last page
of this book I've written by mistake,
I repeat the question like a mantra:
How can suffering be translated
into flight? until the skin divides
and fluffs into the sweep
of feathers, and arms lengthen
out of yearning,
and what I was before I entered heaven
becomes a speck in the eye--
calcium deposits in the sky
of the intellect.

But pain cannot be thrown off like a cloak;
it is scraped from backs with razorblades.
Listen. In the geographic warps
which scar the globe like seams
on a lunatic quilt,
my people are not screaming.
In extremity, lyricism mutes itself
and a violent hush--the split
second after the guillotine
splits the head from the shoulders,
the moment before the mushy crash
to the ground, in between
the clicks of needles;
the quiet after the compelled ejaculations
of the hinged niggers when the bodies
swing once in a smile line
from left to right and birds
are shocked out of music;
that millimeter of time between
the locked door and the gas explosion
crawling into Semitic lungs like whirling spiders;
that peace prior to departure
when the brown and hungry child lies between
the breasts in sweet imitation of serenity
before the camera's click for the West
and the mother's howl blasts from her mouth--
at that moment poetry is prayer
and language a flagrant disregard
of what we seem to have to be.
No one recreates the omnisecond--
the extended empathy for the void.
Women come closest to it when their screaming
ricochets off holes as deep as rape.
They come closest when children tunnel
from between them covered in the blood-and-mucous
heritage of kings and slaves.
The seam down the meridian is flanked with despair
like runway lights. Inside the fold
is the key to aerodynamics.
If I have the guts to follow it.
If I have the nerve to ponder the edge.

II.

Lucy took a needle
And sewed her lady's clothes.
Her head in plaits of suffering,
Like corn, in rows, in rows.

She sewed until her thumb was gone
Her eyes were crossed and blind;
She didn't sing a sorrow song
Her words were far behind

Between the coast of Africa
And the Carolina shore
Her alphabet is floating like the corpse
Her body wore
When the sea began its rhythm
In her back and in her head
When she knew her eyes were open
To the clamor of the dead.

Lucy took a needle
And sewed her lady's clothes.
Her head in plaits of suffering
Like corn--in rows, in rows.

III.

1st voice:
Love is not a meritocracy, and those who claim
it for the meritorious are wrong.
Love is simple in its devastation.
The wings it gives us are strapped on
with leather bands that cut into the flesh
if the breeze doesn't blow just right
and the great wings are thrown back against the air
like insidious umbrellas and the filaments
of pain are incandescent and love tears
tears from the dryeyed and the Stoic
and makes women mad.

2nd voice:
Love need not be infestation.
In that rare instance when desire and fulfilment
fuse, wet is warm and sex a dialogue between
good friends, then love is a path through
elements and what is sentimental merely
what is true.

IV.

When everything's projection,
integrity is lost,
and now I'm afraid
that all she's seen is manufactured
and all she's written down a fabrication.
Between the sheets of where she is
lies a continent. If it had a name
it would be Africa Omega where the early bones
of early tribes were laid bare--
the femurs white "I's" in the red earth.
These are not ideas but actualities--
this white noise from the dark.
Her features are a descant
to the sun--the flat nose
and...