Composition with Guitar and Apples

She eats breakfast
after a night of long sound.
A plate of sliced apples.
A guitar on a corner table.
A rock singer. But listen.
Her almond face on an album cover.
Lean.
Black hieroglyphic eyes.
Chocolate elbows.
Tonight they have heard her,
singing till the pipes are hollow.

Hieroglyphic eyes,
and sometimes dangerous.

Sitting at the table,
the guitar goes with her.
At night,
glued to the shoulders.

Flight from Amsterdam.
Now in an inn in Brazil
(Recife),
she sleeps and awakens
to a plate of apples.

Somewhere in Recife
she has a foster daughter
(adopted through the mails
by some parental plan
for taking care of
the world's hunger).
She has kept her identity
from the girl,
kept herself anonymous,
but has pictures
of the girl
in growing stages,
kept in folders.

Slices of apple in the fist.

"When I saw Hendrix
I know what I wanted.
Everything
but a broken guitar."

She combs her nappy hair,
twists a scarf around it.

She is a thinking woman,
but not always a thoughtful one.

There are chains in her act,
handcuffs,
whips,
but neither
the guitar nor the soul
are broken.

She is certain about the guitar.

Sometimes she is considerate.

In the yard
she walks with the woman
who owns the inn
and from whom she leases
room and board.
The woman is so-called colored
like herself.
The woman is older.
She imagines them
in other landscapes,
timescapes,
spacescapes.
The woman keeps peacocks
in her yard,
against a bewildering superstition.

"In the old days
in colonial Brazil
they thought it was
bad luck
to keep peacocks
in one's yard.
I'm superstitious,
but I like to
challenge superstitions.
I like to confront my fears.
I like to meet them."

So she confronts this fear
with the peacocks strutting.

"I like you," she says.
"I've followed your career.
I like luck.
You seem to glow with luck.
I'm drawn to luck.
It frightens and amazes me."

She does not want to know
about the peacocks,
or her own business.

The peacocks, all masculine,
show their feathers,
their treasures.

The Brazilian woman
shoos a path for them to travel.

"I do it because that's
the only way I know
to handle fear,"
she says.

She does not break the guitar.
But she breaks the melody
down into its pieces.

A plate of broken apples.
Guitar in the corner.

In the afternoon,
she will go to the school,
and stand behind the wrought-
iron railing
and peer at the girl.

In the Amazon
they have discovered gold.
She reads about it
in the papers.

"Wouldn't you like to rush off
to a gold rush,
like in the old days,
the dangers and fevers?
Don't you feel lucky?"

The rock singer smiles
and chews an apple.

"In that last engagement
I lost my voice.
I tried something
with my voice
I shouldn't have tried.
That's why I came here.
To wait until
I get my voice back.
I tried something
I wasn't ready for."

The peacocks are strutting.

"I was almost thirty
before I liked rock and roll.
My classical training.
Then I saw Hendrix."

There are peacocks in the yard.

The woman she stays with
is half woman
half peacock.

Gayl Jones is the author of Corregidora, Eva's Man, Mosquito, and The Healing, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

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