Anodyne
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I love how it swells into a temple where it is held prisoner, where the god of blame resides. I love slopes & peaks, the secret paths that make me selfish. I love my crooked feet shaped by vanity & work shoes made to outlast belief. The hardness coupling milk it can't fashion. I love the lips, salt & honeycomb on the tongue. The hair holding off rain & snow. The white moons on my fingernails. I love how everything begs blood into song & prayer inside an egg. A ghost hums through my bones like Pan's midnight flute shaping internal laws beside a troubled river. I love this body made to weather the storm in the brain, raised out of the deep smell of fish & water hyacinth, out of rapture & the first regret. I love my big hands. I love it clear down to the soft quick motor of each breath, [End Page 699] the liver's ten kinds of desire & the kidney's lust for sugar. This skin, this sac of dung & joy, this spleen floating like a compass needle inside nighttime, always divining West Africa's dusty horizon. I love the birthmark posed like a fighting cock on my right shoulder blade. I love this body, this solo & ragtime jubilee behind the left nipple, because I know I was born to wear out at least one hundred angels.
Yusef Komunyakaa, the subject of this issue of Callaloo, teaches at Princeton University. His most recent book of poems is Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part I. The numerous prizes, awards and honors he has received for his poetry include a chancellorship with the American Academy of Poets, the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Wesleyan University), the William Faulkner Prize (Universite Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
