Excerpt Providence I walked away with your face stolen from a crowded room, & the sting of requited memory lived beneath my skin. A name raw on my tongue, in my brain, a glimpse nestled years later like a red bird among wet leaves on a dull day. A face. The tilt of a head. Dark lipstick. Aletheia . The unknown marked on a shoulder, night weather in our heads. I pushed out of this half-stunned yes, begging light, beyond the caul's shadow, dangling the lifeline of Oh. I took seven roads to get here & almost died three times. How many near misses before new days slouched into the left corner pocket, before the hanging fruit made me kneel? I crossed five times in the blood to see the plots against the future-- descendent of a house that knows all my strong & weak points. No bounty of love apples glistened with sweat, a pear-shaped lute plucked in the valley of the tuber rose & Madonna lily. Your name untied every knot in my body, a honey-eating animal reflected in shop windows & twinned against this underworld. Out of tide-lull & upwash a perfect hunger slipped in tooled by an eye, & this morning makes us the oldest song in any god's throat. We had gone back walking on our hands. Opened by a kiss, by fingertips on the Abyssinian stem & nape, we bloomed from underneath stone. Moon-pulled fish skirted the gangplank, a dung-scented ark of gopherwood. Now, you are on my skin, in my mouth & hair as if you were always woven in my walk, a rib unearthed like a necklace of sand dollars out of black hush. You are a call & response going back to the first praise-lament, the old wish made flesh. The two of us a third voice, an incantation sweet-talked & grunted out of The Hawk's midnight horn. I have you inside a hard question, & it won't let go, hooked through the gills & strung up to the western horizon. We are one, burning with belief till the thing inside the cage whimpers & everything crazes out to a flash of silver. Begged into the fat juice of promises, our embrace is a naked wing lifting us into premonition worked down to a sigh & plea. Water If only I could cleave myself from the water table below this two-step, from this opaque moan & tremble that urge each bright shoot up, this pull of the sea on fish under a pregnant moon. I sweat to buy water. It breaks into a dirge polishing stone. The oathtaker who isn't in hock to salt merchants & trinket kings, says, Drink more water, Mister Bones. The taste of azure. To rinse bile from the bony cup of regret, to trouble rivers till the touch of gold Columbus & his men killed the Arawak for floats up to ravenous light, to flush out every tinge of pity & gall--each of us a compass star & taproot down to what we are made of. Jasmine I sit beside two women, kitty-corner to the stage, as Elvin's sticks blur the club into a blue fantasia. I thought my body had forgotten the Deep South, how I'd cross the street if a woman likes these two walked towards me, as if a cat traversed my path beneath the evening star. Which one is wearing jasmine? If my grandmothers saw me now they'd say, Boy, the devil never sleeps. My mind is lost among November cotton flowers, a soft rain on my face as Richard Davis plucks the fat notes of chance on his upright leaning into the future. The blonde, the brunette-- which one is scented with jasmine? I can hear Duke in the right hand & Basie in the left as the young piano player nudges us into the past. The trumpet's almost kissed by enough pain. Give him a few more years, a few more ghosts to embrace--Clifford's shadow on the edge of the stage. The sign says, No Talking . Elvin's guardian angel lingers at the top of the stairs, counting each drop of sweat paid in tribute. The blonde has her eyes closed, & the brunette is looking at me. Our bodies sway to each riff, the jasmine rising from a valley somewhere in Egypt, a white moon opening countless false mouths of laughter. The midnight gatherers are boys & girls with the headlights of trucks aimed at their backs, because their small hands refuse to wound the knowing scent hidden in each bloom. The Whispering Gallery She's turning away, about to step out of the concave cuddle of Italian tiles before walking through the grand doorway to cross 42nd Street to glance up at The Glory of Commerce as she hails a yellow taxicab when he whispers, I love you, Harriet. Did he say something to himself, something he swore he'd never think again? Or, was she now limestone like Minerva, a half-revealed secret, her breasts insinuating the same domed wisdom? Maybe his mind was already heading home to Hoboken-- his body facing hers--his unsure feet rushing to make a connection with Sinatra's ghost among a trainload of love cries from the Rustic Cabin to Caesar's Palace. Hugged there under the curved grandeur, she says, I love you, too, Johnny. Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom Entangled in one motion of hues stolen from innuendo, their exulted limbs couple & uncouple till the bluish yellow fuses with three other ways of looking at this. With a touch of blood & congealed tempera, black & white faces surge through a nightlife sweating perfumed air. Their moves caught by brush strokes force us to now feel the band on an unseen stage. Bedazzlement & body chemistry ... eyes on each other break the law. They work hard for fun, twirling through sighing loops of fray & splendor, watering down pain till naked hope glimmers in a shot glass. Doppelgängers I wait outside the Beacon Hotel for a taxicab to La Guardia, & dead ringers from Memnon slink past. Here's another. Wasn't Aurora's son killed fighting in Troy for the Trojans? His look-alikes stroll through glass towers & waylay each other's shadows. How many southern roads brought their grandparents here? Why so many chalk-lined bodies mapping departure routes? The Daylight Boys haunt these footsteps tuned to rap & butterfly knives that grow into Saturday-night specials tucked inside jackets ensigned with Suns, Bulls ... Ice. Ecstasy. Crack. Here's another young, bad, good-looking one walking on air solid as the Memnon Colossi, & may not be here at dawn. Somewhere I was on the corner when she paused at the crosswalk. If a cobra's in a coil, it can't take back its strike. Her purse was already in my hands when the first punch landed. She kept saying, "You won't take nobody else's money no more." Her voice was like Mama's. I couldn't break free. Women & kids multiplied before me. At least thirty or forty. Everywhere. Kicking & biting. I kept saying, "I give up." But they wouldn't stop aiming at my balls. The sky tumbled. I was a star in a late-night movie where all these swallows--no, a throng of boys swooped like a cloud of birds & devoured a man on a lonely beach in Mexico, & somewhere outside Acapulco that damn squad of sunflowers blazed up around me. What I heard the stupid paramedics say scared me to death, as the bastards worked on my fucking heart. Copyright (c) 2001 Yusef Komunyakaa. All rights reserved.
