anything that wore
Pants. White, black,
Chinese, crazy, or old.
Some woman in Chicago
hooked a blade into her.
Remember? Now don’t say
You done forgot Charlene.
Her face a little blurred
But she coming back now.
Loud & clear. With those
Real big, sad, gray eyes.
A natural-born hellraiser,
& loose as persimmon pie.
You said it, honey.
Miss High Yellow.
I heard she’s the reason
Frank shot down Otis Lee
Like a dog in The Blue
Moon. She was a blood-
Sucker. I hate to say this,
But she had Arthur
On a short leash too.
Your Arthur, Mary.
She was only a girl
When Arthur closed his eyes.
Thirteen at the most.
She was doing what women do
Even then. I saw them
With my own two eyes,
& promised God Almighty
I wouldn’t mention it.
But it don’t hurt
To mention it now, not
After all these years.
Right column
Heat lightning jumpstarts the slow
afternoon & a syncopated rainfall
peppers the tinroof like Philly Joe
Jones’ brushes reaching for a dusky
backbeat across the high hat. Rhythm
like cells multiplying … language &
notes made flesh. Accents & stresses,
almost sexual. Pleasure’s knot; to wrestle
the mind down to unrelenting white space,
to fill each room with spring’s contagious
changes. Words & music. “Ruby, My Dear”
turned down on the cassette player,
pulsates underneath rustic voices
waltzing out the kitchen—my grandmama
& an old friend of hers from childhood
talking B-flat blues. Time & space,
painful notes, the whole thing wrung
out of silence. Changes. Caesuras.
Nina Simone’s downhome cry echoes
theirs—Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash—
as a southern breeze herds wild, blood-
red roses along the barbed-wire fence.
There’s something in this house, maybe
those two voices & Satchmo’s gold horn,
refracting time & making the Harlem
Renaissance live inside my head.
I can hear Hughes like a river
of fingers over Willie “The Lion” Smith’s
piano, & some naked spiritual releases
a shadow in a reverie of robes & crosses.
Oriflamme & Judgment Day … undulant waves
bring in cries from Sharpeville & Soweto,
dragging up moans from shark-infested
seas as a blood moon rises. A shock
of sunlight breaks the mood & I hear
my father’s voice growing young again,
as he says, “The devil’s beating
his wife”: One side of the road’s rainy
& the other side’s sunny. Imagination—
driftwood from a spring flood, stockpiled
by Furies. Changes. Pinetop’s boogiewoogie
keys stack against each other like syllables
in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day
& Duke. Don’t try to make any sense
out of this; just let it take you
like Pres’s tenor & keep you human.
Voices of school girls rush & surge
through the windows, returning
with the late March wind; the same need
pushing my pen across the page.
Their dresses lyrical against the day’s
sharp edges. Dark harmonies. Bright
as lamentations behind a spasm band
from New Orleans. A throng of boys
are throwing at a bloodhound barking
near a blaze of witch hazel at the corner
of the fence. Mister Backlash.
I close my eyes & feel castanetted
fingers on the spine, slow as Monk’s
“Mysterioso”; a man can hurt for years
before words flow into a pattern
so woman-smooth, soft as a
