- Certainty
- Everybody Needs Improvisation
- The Truth, Nothing But
- After Katrina
- Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me
Certainty
Without traveling to Nashville,
I still know that a boy there is falling piecemeal
into women’s clothes,
that in New Orleans
those who rose inside the water
kept rising
Jehovah smells of mint?
Allah, of gunpowder?
No.
Even I recognize love failing
in ways it must.
Everybody Needs Improvisation
Nature poet handling his plume.
Urban poet, his switchblade.
Each with wings unfolding in his hands.
One travels the boned corset of cactus,
sky lifting its hoopskirt to a meringue of stars.
The other eulogizes children fallen from loveliness, filed
into caskets.
Both behold faces turning to see
and be seen.
They scatter the broken mirror everywhere.
The Truth, Nothing But
for Elvis
Little Richard was angry for years.
He’d given up the Gospel
to somebody white and pretty
who kept begging in that sexy drawl,
heavier
than a roll of quarters,
Show me how to turn my bones
to brown sugar.
I wanna be sweet.
I wanna be sweet.
And that boy sucked the hot
right outta him.
After Katrina
There's no Sabbath in this house.
Just work.
The black of garbage bags
yellow-cinched throats opening
to gloved hands.
Black tombs along the road now,
proof she knew to cherish
the passing things
even those muted before the water came
before the mold's grotesquerie
and the wooden house choked on bones.
My aunt wades through the wreckage, failing
no matter how hard she tries
at letting go.
I look on glad at her failing,
her slow rites
fingering what she'd once been given to care for.
The waistbands of her husband's briefs
elastic as memory
the blank stare of rotted drawers
their irises of folded linen still,
smelling of soap and wood
and clean hands.
Daylight through these silent windows
and I'm sure now: Today is Sabbath,
the work we do, prayer.
I know what she releases into the garbage bags,
shiny like wet skins of seals
beached on the shore of this house.
Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me
I used to think about infinity for several minutes at a time, the hourglass on its side, the narrow neck exhaling into each chamber. Not having the faintest about how that would work, I always moved on to something known, like how loudly my stepfather snored when he was dog-tired, how people in my South sit on porches and stoops waiting for anything like heaven to be flung before their eyes, anything electric and mighty different. About porches and stoops in heaven, I've yet to think long. But won't all who make it be electric? At rest in the neck of the hourglass?
