|
|
Timothy Black
Death Raises Ghosts
Death
It is very hard, sometimes, to walk past graveyards with their weeping willows and their tall stone markers. I remember the young girl next door who is now buried there, six feet above twelve feet under. Her personal stone, when viewed under reflected sun- light shows her in rainbows, smiling the smile of the forever alive. I imagine her parents winding down their days. Mornings at the kitchen table, evenings around the fire contemplating her, and the world’s, amazing depth. Sometimes when I walk past the frozen rows I can ignore just how deep it is, and my own still beating heart.
Raises
The dying man said he smelled baking bread when asked what dying was like. He had a hole blown through his heart, was gasping through hot lungs, was staring through fresh cataracts. The hitch when he spoke was what really got to me. When I was young I remember my mom baking bread. It was an all-day task back then. She would tell me to walk softly through the kitchen – said any little movement could cause the rising loaves to fall. When my wife asks what my youth was like, I tell her it was like the smell of baking bread.
Ghosts
My parents have a pre- paid funeral. They say it’s for the living, so we (or they, if I am dead) won’t have to deal with that as well as our stunning grief. They put the matter to rest, and spend each day like ghosts, clanking chains, and waiting to get their money’s worth.
Mulatto Mongrel Cliché
White child, what’s in your wallet? Black child, what’s in your heart? And which line’s longer, you son-of-a-bitch? I paid the price of hailstones and shotgun shells, bad crank and great crystal meth to ask those three questions to the fucked and the damned.
The hail formed when the wind whipped rain up and up through the chill firmament. I press the black cat down beside me where he purrs in a great black mass. Those opaque balls fall hard on the cars of the just and unjust alike. The bright red shells
were sprinkled through the carpet of tall grass and adorned with swastikas and racial slurs – die niggurkind, die falsetto whiteboy. Die unholy baritone trinity. The bad
crank glew yellow and dove down to the devil’s palace of sulfur and ice-blue regret. There is no girl with dirty-blonde dreads in this one to lighten the load, no brunette to shoot a load into anymore. There never were. Here never is.
And good crystal meth looks like Japanese hard rock candy, like the shards of copper sulfate at Hackberry Lake. It’s as blue as your baby’s eyes, but not blue at all. What’s typed on your head whiteboy? What’s
stapled to your heart, niggerchile’? What was in your mind, you filthy cliché? I could guess, but it’s too lonely and too blue and too cold in this fucking rubber room to think, let alone worship your left-alone slapstick comedy.
Snake as Nigger
Tonight, this very night. A near-black water moccasin, with chain-link marks on his wet back emerges from the weight of spring water. He holds a nickel that shines like a fallen chunk of moon between his fangs and the crus clitoris of his tongue.
In the light of this faltered day the moon sees this coin and wants it back. The snake winds like kite string through the wet, high afghan of grass. The moon can only glower down on the snake, can only whisper lightly for its fallen desire.
What is the coin? Out here there are no books to read, no discarded condom shells. The only screams are from feather-picked night hawks, stressed at the water’s furious parting from carp jumping. We invent these hawks, just like we invent the coin and the moon’s undoing when we summon the words to fail at its description.
We fancy ourselves masters of those that would punish us with poisons. We tinker with phosphorus compounds we place in glass pipes. We don’t know
enough to leave well enough alone. We tread on reservation land, and hand out tickets to come see the snake. Come, make a wish: throw a coin into the lake, and see
what will come of it, wet, black and angry.
Timothy Black’s first poetic novella, Connecticut Shade, is in its second printing through WSC Press. He teaches poetry at Wayne State College, and is a Cave Canem Fellow. He lives in Wakefield, Nebraska with his wife and two sons.
Timothy’s work has appeared in the anthologies The Logan House Anthology of 21st Century American Poetry, The Great American Roadshow, and Words Like Rain. He has been published in The Platte Valley Review and at bringtheink.com , has poems forthcoming in Breadcrumb Scabs and has won an Academy of American Poets prize for his poem Heavy Freight.
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Dark Lady Poetry, 2010. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 2152-8594