Archives: The Public Library, I
- Archives: the Public Library, I
“But great artists never imitate their equals; they plagiarize from their inferiors.”in memory of Ralph Waldo Ellison, 1914–1994
One was named for you in the town you were born, almost everything finetuned into music, dance music: any kid knows most streets are meant to destroy him; and women die on the branch.
And birds sing: nightingales, crows, tanengers, owls, aspects of the human nomenclature of the divine as ninety-nine sacred names on the seams of your brow and you a child of slavery with ministers of each spectrum transforming the flocks as on “Juneteenth,” when word finally reached Galveston, Texas, that the war was over and every soul had to employ, be productive, feed himself, feed others, and refuse to eat of his brother, his sister, no matter the hue & cry, no matter miscegenation
that city is on no hill you can fathom outside the family you have made and denied [End Page 364]
so we will commence with the cemetery where the flowers are nameable as peace abundant as prairie every Indian a clan each clan a language whose edibles cannot be written down and remembered ritual being the mother of unbearable pressure and what to comprehend as the earth cannot be owned but maneuvered in spiritual claim for a perfected process: density of detritus, bones, amulets, rituals of invention as one survives nothing but what is beyond us: the use of us a beneficence after weaponry after unhusbanded improvisation against one’s fears and every woman shaman for technologists nuclear children in the nuclei a polyglot escrescence improvenander boomerang facefulness sipped modally from needful air from cold fire pure voicefulness no trained incapacity here, thus antagonistic cooperation in the pentad [End Page 365] made triangular slave trader in the quadrants of the heavens which is self-invention self-promotional glee at what no one could have made before the process
and that process changed utterly, utterly changed in the living which is deathless dying: dying’s not death, do not grieve as you wash away unnerving tears in ceaseless voyaging in cities in prairies deep within in aboriginal calm an original blessing
Michael S. Harper is author of several volumes of poems, including Images of Kin and Healing Song for the Inner Ear. He is I.J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and literature.
