Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa Wesleyan Poetry Series

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noise.

      Car horns & solstitial candlepower.

      Another long day runs

      with a pack of house-broken mutts

      around the neighborhood, treeing

      cats on fenceposts. The runt

      which sprung into Cerberus

      slinks beneath the moon’s mad

      dogma, tamed when bloody feet

      touch springy St. Augustine

      grass where Ra & Shamash

      linger at the timberline.

      The winter sun is now Bessie’s

      “Yellow Dog Blues”

      given to you by a lover

      who drove off with a friend

      years ago. The shadows long,

      & kisses too. A celestial claw

      bluffs the last sprigs of wolfbane

      into hush as “Yellow Submarine”

      submerges in the hue of machines

      where a good feeling goes before

      it’s known. But there’s a dog-eared

      season that never fails to be reborn

      as Sirius beside the back door,

      hungry for the sound of your VW.

       Penn Station

      Images of the homeless

      & pigeons on a third rail

      roost in my bowed head.

       Newark

      An apartheid of snow

      crowns itinerant ghosts inside

      abandoned blue machines.

       Elizabeth

      “Careless Love”: She is

      Athena’s re-flowering,

      a rebirth of awe.

       Linden

      Couples kiss under

      B-movie ads, the motion

      nudging them on—on. …

       Rahway

      The Taj Mahal glows

      through the out-of-season silk

      of her composure.

       Metropark

      I daydream Ezra Pound

      as faces cluster on night’s bough—

      where did she come from?

       Metuchen

      Winter flowers droop

      to her nods, suspended there

      inside pain’s headshop.

       Edison

      Here, gods extinguish

      a light whenever a lineman

      drops dead on the job.

       New Brunswick

      The voice of Black Horse

      a logbook of old sorrows

      lives beside the river.

       Jersey Avenue

      White ice in the trees

      mute cathedral. Her dark skin,

      her dark eyes, bright mouth.

       Princeton Junction

      I glimpse happiness

      heading the other direction

      sometimes, not quite here.

       Trenton

      I missed my stop

      looking at heartbreak, the sky

      almost criminal.

       Early Uncollected

      Now the disorder of your words

      makes some lavender sense

      a knife-edge of seeing.

      Birds meditate on powerlines

      over Red Rocks, quills

      ravel into a drift of muscle,

      & your fingers swear

      they’d die if they couldn’t

      touch a guitar. Some surprise

      bursts under your breath

      boils of honey.

      Those days when Jesse B.

      Semple was quick to say,

      “You can take the boy

      outta the country …”

      Joplin, Lawrence, Lincoln,

      all left watermarks: an eye

      of habit from turning up hems

      & talking at the bottom of blue.

      Agate polished itself

      as this word weaver

      groped for a foothold

      in the boneyard,

      watching hypnotic bird

      voices condense in spoons.

      A greenhorn among zoot-suited

      swingers who danced with skirts

      lost in a glare of horns

      as long chains flowed out of empty pockets.

      No, not Sprung Rhythm.

      That guy with Thunder

      Smith on Gold Star

      who said, “I was born with the blues.”

      After mile-long cotton rows

      & Blind Lemon Jefferson

      at The Rainbow,

      he’d touch the strings

      & know every note in the groin.

      Catgut & a diamond needle

      cut grooves in race records—

      the flatted thirds, twelve

      bars of flesh idiom.

      We inherited more than body language.

      Pantomimic ghost flowers & sones:

      our hands tied through gray weather

      refuse to salute treadmill foremen.

      Some waltz backwards off bridges,

      & others sleepwalk to Solzhenitsyn’s

      State Department

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