I Wanted to Place an Ocean, and: From Which I Flew, and: Carry Me

I Wanted to Place an Ocean

The fields of Rolesville belong to my kinfolk, dead and alive.            I told my uncle's ghostdon't waste your time haunting white folks who owe you money,we all have different ways        we come to know red clay.

I began in fields near pines where we laughed and fired fish.        If someone were to sing, it would grow through each ghost        and be heard as geese crossing overhead.

The dead only knowthe work they have done.

I've never had to work cotton or tobaccoor pull small green worms from my hands. I only played

        in harvested fields, in one I'd be in Harlem—a whole row my block, the oak way off a skyscraper            I looked up into for myself.

When people let the cotton sleep there were no vacations,I don't know if my great-great-grandparents ever saw the ocean,                or fell asleep on the beach.

From Which I Flew

Only together holding hands in silence can I see what a field has doneto my mother, aunts, and uncles.

The land around my grandmother'sold tin roof has changed,I doubt she'd recognize it from above.How many blackbirds does it taketo lift a house? I'll bring my living,you wake your dead.

We have nowhere to go, but we're leaving anyhow,by many ways. When they ask, Whyyou want to fly, blackbird? Say,

I want to leave the Southbecause it killed the first man I lovedand so much more killing.Say, My son's name,

his death was the first thing to break me inand fly me through town.

If grief has a body it wears his Dodgers capand still walks to the corner store to buy lottery ticketsand Budweiser 40s.

I don't like what I have to be here to be.

All the blackbirds with nowhere to gokeep leaving.

Carry Me

after Langston Hughes

I followed the shimmer far down a road I still haven't foundthe ending to. I picked up my lifemy mother sewed a map to back of—so one day I'd lay it out and travel back to the flat landof eastern North Carolina.A map to land where my body will finally die,where my ghost won't ride the trains all night,count steps from liberty to home.

I tried to find the ocean before I was covered in southern soil.I put my head underneath the Atlantic, swallowed so many memories,I'm filled with people,        someone has taught me to fly.Whichever way I flew, my inheritance couldn't be liftedfrom northeastern North Carolina's wet clay,its hands harden around my already weighted ankles.

My mother's mother planted hydrangeas where I wanted to place an ocean.Where I wanted to place an ocean, she grew me.

I picked up my life, for it was the only one I had to pick up,the way the body must pick itself up if no one is aroundto offer a rounded hand out of the snow that only buries. Stuck to my lifewere the same things I carry back with me now,my father's lying I've mastered and wear how a field wears the bones of birds.The green tint of gin bottles my uncles made of their bare nights.

My mother,    the only reason I have something to pick up.