Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Read online

  As dark as death they scrutinized each other

  Searching for those already dead ghosts: Boris, Osip, Marina

  All dead before her, Tsvetaeva a sucide; Mandelstam hounded

  To death by Stalin; Pasternak exiled

  Old friends, old enemies, old lovers, old prisonmates

  Joined in pain, in torture, in mouning, in perfidy

  The tiny cemetary packed with the crowd’s sneaking shadows

  Overrun the walls and line up in silence as if awaiting

  A firing squad—no one cries “long live the Revolution”

  But a boy recites Pasternak’s Hamlet

  There is no Christian voice—no theologian

  As if Akhmatova had not been a Russian Orthodox

  Only the verses chanted by heart by young people proved it;

  Poem without hero, Rosary, Plantain, Requiem

  KGB agents reappeared like sprouting mushrooms

  The fresh tomb yawned and opened its arms

  Embracing clumps of deaf and dumb earth

  The coffin groaned into its place like a tulip bulb

  Under the hail of clay and dirt that blinded all,

  “Deafened” as Pushkin would say “by the noise of inner anxiety”

  This solitude is nothing like the solitude of the before,

  This solitude is either the ultimate prison or the passage to Paradise

  Which will never erace the voice we still hear

  From beyond the grave, you hear her voice

  And you accord it faith

  Whose victory was it?

  I don’t know

  Perhaps poetry itself

  Arabesque to Frank’s Rivers

  All the different degrees of goodness

  In painting may be reduced to the

  Mediocre, or indifferently good

  The excellent and the sublime

  The sublime therefore must be marvelous and surprising

  It must strike vehemently upon the mind

  And fill and captivate it irresistibly

  —Jonathan Richardson, 1719

  I

  I picture you with your black Fedora and gold rim glasses

  In one of those strange aboriginal canoes navigating

  The lusty currents of the four great rivers of your life

  The Essequibo, the Berbice, the Hudson, and the Thames

  Between the dawn and the dusk one finds in their dregs;

  Each, not only moving water, but memories of light

  II

  My, you were handsome, black bearded and strong,

  Impossible to look at and not love,

  Bewitched by your own nautical surfaces, so thick

  They stopped floods; that terse sunset of yellow, that melancholy

  Mellow sky, Grenadine sprinkled with specks of gold, making it

  Hard to understand whether it was the end of the day, or the end of the world.

  III

  Luminous color, floats like a vessel on somebody else’s reverie

  Evokes the Essenquibo which never knows in which

  Direction it flows, black ink running through emerald green,

  With Gyuanian slices of red and magenta all curled up

  In tropical cobalt blue and before you knew it you were

  Painting the portrait of a place you would soon forget

  IV

  Splendid and dreadful tides come and leave

  Ebbing and rising with the Monsoon, spilling out over the reeds

  And rushes stomped over by a thousand pink herons

  Sleeping on one leg, forgetting that underneath their feet lies Atlantis,

  Like a declaration of love in a courtship, the marriage contract

  Nailed to the Cathedral door, but you had to behold other rivers

  V

  The Berbice is a conflux of three rivers at Georgetown that

  Empties into the arms of wetlands and soft flats surrounded

  By tropical forests, a whistle-stop at the end of the world, the outpost

  Where Caravaggio never died on the beach and Rembrandt never slept

  Is no more than a stream in comparison to what will come,

  Intoxicating your teen-age heart with the tenacity of a conquistador

  VI

  Peering over your shoulder for ambush at every drip of gel,

  Every lavish surface and combed unzipped landscape,

  Haunted by rivers that flow through your veins like blood

  Like sake, or vodka except that you prefer English whisky

  Straight, no ice and the Scottish songs of backstreet Mayfair pubs

  That you stumble into unbuttoned like a horny sailor on furlough

  VII

  That’s what happened when you passed under that first bridge

  Over the Thames and came face to face with free will,

  Its navy-blue shadows invaded your life along with the color gray,

  Along with winter, fog, snow and the frontier of your fame

  Aren’t you happy? Why do you hold your breath and stare?

  This melancholy light will be with you until your days are over,

  VIII

  The rivers continue to flow subterraneous, subversively

  Beneath the surface of bohemian and literate life, erupting

  From time to time in great Levesque undulations that fry and dry all,

  Sweeping the poker table clean, so like Pushkin’s grandfather Hannibal,

  You ruin yourself raising hell, bankrupting years, accumulating

  Debts, building citadels to assault Turner, Gainsbourgh, and Reynolds

  IX

  Raising your moveable canvases to allow the sea breeze of the river’s burnt umber

  To summon Homer and Ulysses until you wear yourself out with the mundane

  And head for the new world and Warhol, Brooklyn, Babylon,

  Studio 54, the Factory and Miles Davis, and the Hudson

  This river, which wore America’s colors; red; white, blue and black

  New raw acrylic colors, plastic gel, loose canvas and wax

  X

  Sharing bed and breakfast with the gang at the Chelsea Hotel

  Picking up dames and musicians’ grass bemused by

  The USA’s penchant for discussions about race and

  The color black which you rarely use, deferring to Rothko

  To define the holocaust, rather than the Diaspora

  Leaving America’s obsession, to Americans and their morning coffee,

  XI

  Concentrating instead on Turner’s glow, that angel dust of the sublime

  Thighs open for the taking like homesteading in Australia

  Crossing vast corn fields as wild as the extinct American bison

  Those one-ton beasts in the room with the exterminated Indians

  Until you steamship home on the Queen Elizabeth returning to

  The cool grace of the Thames luminescence in Shakespearian love,

  XII

  And Thames’ obsession and redemption: the light

  Holograph of the effect of greatness upon feeling: the landscape,

  Holding forth and holding up the universe of immateriality

  That work of art which in its perfection arrives at the sublime

  Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway, that abstract

  Immensity that evokes only omnipotent energy and saving grace.

  Famine II

  The rains didn’t come in October

  The rains didn’t come in April

  The rains hadn’t come in four years

  When my last goat died

  When my last cow fell to its knees

  I picked up my children and all I possessed,

  A few rags, a plastic bottle, a metal pail

  A stove, a plow, the Koran and I left

  At every village we grew in members,

  From a column of hundreds, then thousands

  From any village to a nation of
a million souls

  We came, walked silent and loose-eyed with hunger

  With nothing to drink and only leaves to eat.

  I buried my son when he dropped, where he stood

  Then a daughter, then another daughter.

  I watched seven people sit down and die

  I carried my 4th on my back

  Then I realized he was dead too so I lifted him

  Off and buried him there, on the way from

  Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda

  Three million people stumbled towards refuge and any river,

  Surging around the Horn of Africa like the sea;

  The long slow death march across

  The three million year old desert, its name

  The sigh of a plea for water, Sahel, Sahara

  I stood, holding my last suckling enfant Rukiah

  A miracle of survival because I could still nourish her,

  My bare feet burned into the malignant sand, my sari

  No more than a rag with nothing to cover my hair,

  My scarf I had used as a shroud for the last burial

  The eyes of Rukiah held no reproach and followed

  My lips as my prayers fell like, my tears,

  Indifferently and silently without sobs or curses

  Quietly like mother elephants searching for burial grounds

  For a few million Somalis who surrounded me, stomachs rumbling

  Followed by a hiccup of pain and Rukiah’s wail,

  As people moved on and away walking to nowhere with nothing

  I wondered what terrible thing we had done,

  To have ended up here, who in his anger Allah was

  Punishing, as I watched her eyes roll back in her head

  And death take her silently without a whimper

  I did not break my stride nor slow my shuffle

  But continued stubbornly still carrying her as if alive

  Two days later I put her down and tore the hem off my last skirt

  And wrapped her in it, lighting a bonfire under her body to cheat

  The vultures followed the dying masses and braggingly

  Walked besides us like cousins, laughing as I wept that

  There was no water to wash her; overhead a Predator Drone

  Mixed its hum with the wide winged predators of God

  Who saluted the famished hordes and the armies of Exodus

  Famine II

  The hordes of wrath

  Marched straight across the beach to

  The rim of the Mediterranean

  Peering over its brim at Europe

  Masses of the famished from

  The horn of Africa wading

  Waist deep into the rough sea

  Come to part the waters to the continent

  And is the white man ready?

  For visitors from inner space?

  Aliens in blood and color

  Climate and religion or so they say,

  The poor who make up 98 percent

  Of planetary humankind

  Would they shoot these feverish bastards?

  Fire rubber bullets into the crowd?

  Or would it be cruise missiles

  From an aircraft carrier combating

  This second coming of the Diaspora

  Obliterating distance, standing

  On each other’s shoulders, to

  Drain the sea, leaving only brine

  And spangled banners of independence

  They consume in all the oxygen

  In the H2O ocean which evaporates

  Into salt flats strong enough to walk upon

  Declaring war by immigration

  The brave and the cowardly, young and old

  Laborers and farmers, soldiers and police,

  Unending gratuitous humanity

  And Europe gets its guns

  The sea they thought was wide enough

  Turned out to be a pond unfit to

  Segregate the haves and haves more from

  The have-nots and never-will have’s

  They scamper up Gibraltar

  And overrun Spain, they spy

  On France, from Lampedusa

  Their armada is stronger than

  The need for oil and gas

  Petrol rigs turned into public Housing

  Empire builders of yore the joke’s on you

  The natives have learned their lesson well,

  No more glass beads for black gold

  Or yellow gold for whisky and venereal disease

  The end of exploitation of the colored races

  A stone’s throw, they throw stones

  Hardly ever missing their mark: England,

  France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain

  Banging on tin plates for food, moving

  As one great mass toward extinction

  And Europe gets its glass and aliens to kill

  The Arab Spring, the Somali famine, the

  Libyan Revolution, the Afghan Taliban

  Africans have sent not one grain of rice

  To their fellow Africans, the Shame of

  South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria, No

  They wait for the Humanitarians to arrive

  From outer space except that very soon

  The humanitarians will be extinct like

  The Snow Leopard and Africa will sink

  Into the sea like Atlantis never to rise

  Never to hold that one moment of true

  Freedom, of exhilarating true independence

  That of the un-rhetorical ancient gods

  Those that supercede Islam and Christianity

  Undoing that knot of memory and releasing

  The powers of old; salvation and resurrection

  In which famine will vanish, earthquake, fire

  Locusts will no longer breed in the tainted ozone.

  And the hordes will turn back towards the

  Mother of humanity, the Diaspora graves will open

  And Eden will displace famine

  The Gods will walk once more around the rim of

  The Mediterranean who will feed them and invent a new

  Empire of the Poor of the Earth, ready

  To claim their heritage so long deferred,

  To the suicides and perish standing.

  Earthquake

  I

  Once upon a time,

  Just north of Memphis,

  Near the town of New Madrid,

  A brave new world ended

  With shocks so great, the ground liquefied

  And the Mississippi River flowed backwards,

  New lakes appeared and dinosaur bones

  Blurted forth defying 3 million years of solitude

  Vast icebergs in the Arctic moved

  Yet it was not the Apocalypse we had imagined,

  People were still loved and hated, babies were born,

  The sun set between the golden thighs of the

  Grand Canyon, which opened and yawned at the sky,

  Shaking in a mad Parkinson’s disease dance

  The real world shook itself like a dog so empty, it echoed

  II

  Nothing was still especially those intrepid hearts

  Which beat like trapped moths in a glass jar

  While whole towns disappeared without a trace,

  Prehistoric bacteria emerged from earth’s surface,

  Radioactivity flung itself over humankind, and

  Animals alike burning the grassy plains the

  Sickly yellowish color of serpent venom

  Rising from the Rockies as blood red lava,

  Ash as profound as a sequel to 9/11

  Then came the Tsunami wave vacuuming fields and deserts

  And we could only hold fast waling or go under wondering

  Who had done what to Mother Nature who coughed

  And laughed, her naked buttocks gleaming, straddling

  The debris, pissing into the flood as she took back

/>   The planet we had borrowed, and gave us Pandemonium

  The Affliction of Troy Davis

  Look, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

  —Issiah, 49:16

  I

  Life, or what is left of it, ends

  In Chathan County Penitentiary, Georgia,

  On Death Row, strapped to the execution charriot

  Behind a glass wall of blank faces,

  Still concious of a last meal refused,

  Still gagged by the last words uttered

  To the mother of the slain white patrolman

  “I am not responsible for your son’s death”

  As the lethal injection begins to erase

  The last protestation of Innocence

  Unable to imagine how it would feel

  To be truly guilty instead of innocent

  More innocent than the free breeze faultering

  Through this transparent cubicle surrounding

  Impenetrable faces filled with ignorance and contempt

  For everything he has ever been or stood for,

  His own mother’s cruel words to close his eyes,

  “Let this crucifixion be done, this longest day

  Be finished, this twenty year supplice be ended

  And that night falls, that peace is brought, that rest stays

  With the seven recanted witnesses and the one

  Who avowed the murder himself”

  Despite all this, the machine of injustice grinds on

  As thoughtless as the cosmos while the condemned man cries, “Look

  I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”

  II

  All those enforcers who compell colored boys

  (I was not yet 20) to confess under duress

  All those southern state prosecuters who

  Comply to mendacity and miscarriages of justice,

  All that time on the cross on death row in

  Torturous humanity, and anxious prayer and fasting;

  From March 18, 1991 until today, September 24, 2011

  While the world wrings its hands and cries “Shame”

  One million petitioners howling for justice, for mercy,

  For truth, for humanity, for comprehension, for honor,

  Carter, Sessions, Tutu, the Pope, Mandela, Sarkozy,

  51 members of the House, 18 senators, 14 nobles excluding

  Obama who seems to think silence is statesmanship

  Instead of hypocrisy, perverted states rights, and politics

  Ignoring gross judicial errors, racism, false witness,