start to sprawl
on half-scorched lawns
like summer girls
late to the beach.
They flaunt once-green hips
dappled red and yellow,
begin to swing and fling
themselves from branches,
carefree, as if life is a party
and they are too
young, too beautiful to die.
The King of Harlem
(Poet in New York 1929-1930)
1.
With a spoon
he scraped out the crocodile eyes,
and popped the monkeys on the knickers—
with his scepter, a spoon
where fire forever slept in his flint,
and beetles lazed drunk on anise,
forgetting comfort, the cold village moss.
That bent crone covered in mushrooms
went where Black men sorrow, where I heard
the creaking approach of the King’s spoon—
the trucks, their rotten water tanks, they arrived.
Roses broke free along the corners
of the whipping curves of city air
and then took root in pounds of saffron
where the children squished baby squirrels
with the infant blush of a wine harvest’s frenzy.
This is it. Let us now cross these bridges,
let us reach Harlem and the Black people within,
their sacred murmur, so their color and perfume
will rise past our shoulders burning to
a rich, sugary hot pineapple.
This is it. Murder the blondes! The hard liquor seller,
and all friends of apple and sand,
you must beat them down with closed fists,
and be it necessary be it against the little Jewish women
shaking to boiling,
that the King may sing song to the throng,
that crocodiles may sleep end to end under the asbestos of the moon,
that no one alive may ever once doubt the infinite beauty
of feather dusters, cheese graters, copper pans, and casseroles.
Oh, Harlem, Harlem, Harlem!
Nothing compares to the anguish of your oppressed reds.
Or your shuddering, enraged blood inside a lunar eclipse.
Or your garnet violence, a jewel spinning in the shadow.
Or your grand king, prisoner in a doorman’s uniform.
2.
The night was torn like lizard skin. It crawled with silent ivory salamanders
and American girls
carried babies and investments in their wombs
while boy stretched their arms hopelessly on the cross and swooned.
They are the ones.
They drink silver whiskey near the volcanoes
and swallow raw, bloody heart in the bear’s frozen mountain.
3.
That night the King of Harlem, with a most implacable spoon
scraped out the crocodile eyes
and popped the monkeys on the knickers—
with his scepter, a spoon.
The Blacks cried in confusion
among umbrellas and gold sunsthe mulattoes stretched rubber, pondering anxiously to turn their torsos white
and wind tarnished mirrors
and broke the veins of the dancers
Blackness, Blackness, Blackness, Blackness
When your nose points up at night, you don’t blush.
The rage under your skin is exposed and unprotected.
Live in the dagger point and in the chest of landscapes
under the claws and the broom of Cancer’s moon.
Blood that searches death’s road dusted with flour
to rise from ashes of funerary spikenards
lifeless, coming down where Mars and Venus come
to spin with the trash on our beaches.
Blood quietly considered, out of the corner of its eye;
the essence, made of squeezed halfah grass, underground nectars.
Blood that oxidizes and the trade wind set into a footprint,
that dissolves the nightshade moth by moon into the window panes.
Blood comes, it will pour
on rooftops, everywhere,
to burn chlorophyll that makes blonde women grow,
to groan and fumble at the feet of the beds before the insomnia of the bathroom vomit begins, but first
we sleep slipping into a tobacco fog and a gentle yellow vanilla sky.
There must be a way out!
A way around the alleys, somewhere in a penthouse to hole up in.
Imagine the tendrils of forest growth penetrating the cracks
to make of you a real beauty, an eclipse without eyes or ears
with a false sense of sadness—whether faded glove and chemical rose.
4.
Silence. The word on the street, unspoken, it is all that you need;
it is how waiters, busboys, cooks, bootlickers, asslickers to
all those fat cats and gangsters
seek the king in the streets or on the sharp angles to saltpeter.
The wind cuts across at a glance, black mud flying,
spitting at bay boats and driving nails in their shoulders;
a South wind carrying
dog teeth, sunflowers, wooden alphabet games,
and a voltaic battery resuscitating drowned wasps.
I knew oblivion with three drops left to clean my monocle.
I knew love when you looked at me, a flower of stone. Alone.
And soaring the clouds I knew sustenance and such richness
composing a desert of long stems without a rose.
To the left, and the right, to the South, and the North,
a completely impenetrable wall rises,
whether the magician be mole or water.
In my country, Black people, we do not go to some crack
in the wall for an infinite mask—
we seek the great sun in the center.
Turn into a wild, buzzing swarm of warm, syrupy pineapple.
The sun sliding through the forests,
sure that a nymph will not be there.
The sun that destroyed mathematics, and has never caused a dream,
the tattooed sun coming down the river
and gives a throaty call just ahead of the crocodiles.
Blackness, Blackness, Blackness, Blackness.
No serpent, zebra, or mule ever thought of themselves
as much as we before death. They didn’t turn pale.
The lumberjack doesn’t know when the wood
he cuts will rot.
Hold still in your vegetal shadow in wait for your King,
until hemlock, thistles, and nettles curl around the balconies and tiles.
Then, Black people, and only then
will you frantically kiss spinning bicycles flying by,
examine pairs of microscopes in subterranean squirrel lairs,
and dance doubtlessly while itching flowers assassinate
Our Moses near heaven’s gate.
It’s Harlem in disguise!
It’s, Harlem, threatened by a mob of headless suits!
I hear your murmur coming to my ears,
I hear it moving in trees and elevators,
my gray sheets,
where cars float beneath bridges covered with teeth,
by way of dead horses and misdemeanors,
by way of a great awakened, despairing king
whose beard reaches the sea.
Author: Federico García Lorca
Translator: Manny Grimaldi
Somewhere out there, there is hope.
Carefully woven
within the shredded fabric
of a well loved blanket, or quilt,
made up of scraps
filled with memories,
and yesterday’s trash.
Set aside, a mug filled with warm milk
mixed with a sweet honey,
topped of with a soft kiss
on your temple.
Art made of believing,
joy,
and a painful submitting to memories
long gone.
Embracing you in a tight hug
warm but somehow familiar.
You sit, cry
dream of another time.
But dread leaving
the present all the same.
I used to play beneath the giant oaks
That framed my grandparents house
Planted to cool the place in summer,
As it was built well before there was
Such a thing as air conditioning, the
House constructed to move air via
Well-placed windows and doors as
They all were in those days
I’d play for hours, all by myself so
My mammy could watch her stories
And my pappy napped on the porch
Right there in the shade of those oaks
My imagination more than enough
To keep me entertained
I don’t remember being hot despite
It being in the throes of southern
Summer, and me outside pert nigh
All day long; nobody ever complained
The house was made for that, to stay
Cool in summer and warm in winter
I have only good memories
They got their first air conditioner,
A window unit, around the turn of
The century; my pappy wouldn’t
Turn it on, said it made him freeze
My mammy used it after he died
Not long after the towers fell
That time in my life
Felt like the end of an era
As well as the end of my childhood
Buildings falling; pappy’s leaving
And their house proper cold
Even during the Kentucky heat
Names of my playlists, but they get progressively worse:
In the shadows.
Disconnected and just out of reach
Tendrils of doubt threaten to overgrow, overthrow faith in the plan.
What if waiting is wasted?
Bullet train time ticks and wrinkled hands tell truths of age,
Threatening to catch me when my eyes are turned away from the next obstacle in the path
Patience
Caution on the teetering stones
Step into the swirls
And remember
You are His.
Sometimes I sit near the doorway
at my favorite coffee shoppe,
a single expresso and scone
atop the table. I stare out
through the mismatched window
panes onto the sidewalk traffic
moving in opposite directions.
I suppose that’s what happened
to us. Still, I wish you’d walk
through that door, and sit at my table
so I could just ask you
how you’re doing.
