Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa Wesleyan Poetry Series

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mind’s on Americus,

      Georgia. Caught up in paperwork

      of murder & audio surveillance,

      weapons experts tread air

      in oxblood Bostonians.

       —for Nicolas Guillen

      A turning away from flowers.

      A cutting out of

      stone understands, naked

      before the sculptor.

      I watch you down Telegraph Avenue

      till you sprout into a quivering

      song color.

      But I hope you fall

      from your high horse

      & break your damn neck.

      I had brainphotos

      of riding you down into music.

      I tried to kiss you back then,

      but didn’t know the sweet punishment

      of a tongue inside another voice.

      You were a tree breaking with mangoes,

      bent toward deeper earth,

      & ran out into the world

      before me. Songs floated ahead

      like comic-strip balloons

      where they could breathe hard

      & blow dreams apart.

      The green light kept going

      beyond Blueberry Hill.

      Bandages of silence

      didn’t conceal unsolved crimes,

      & I deserted my voice crawling

      over cobblestone.

      My ribcage a harp

      for many fingers.

      I’ve seen overturned deathcarts

      with their wheels churning

      Guadalajara mornings,

      but your face will always be

      a private country.

      The coffeepot percolates,

      a dying man’s last breath.

      Alone at this onyx window

      I’ve seen Balanced Rock

      perched on the brink of midnight.

      Hard times wrestle water up hills,

      mineshafts worked down to daybreak.

      At this window, I’ve witnessed

      knowledge of hyacinth & burdock,

      how night snow cascades & out of nowhere

      praise flashes like bobwhites

      out of dead grass.

      I want to tell them, when it comes,

      not to question my death,

      the moon will have its say.

      He swings his lamp into a hovel,

      a circle of vermillion.

      Hunger rushes forward.

      He steps back, but the raw odor

      reaches out & hugs him.

      Someone whispers,

      “Our lives fallen angels.

      Songs stolen from the mouths

      of our children, worrybeads

      snatched from dead fingers.”

      Another voice from a year

      of darkness says, “Ask Captain Nobones—

      the one with hemlock in his lapel,

      who always has the flamenco dancer,

      Maria, on his arm.” The lamp

      shimmies up, out of the hole

      in the floor of the summer night,

      & disappears in eucalyptus scent.

      His mother would sigh,

      “God giveth & He taketh.

      My dear child of a dog’s luck.

      A precious thorn works

      deeper into my side.”

      When Billy Boy was seven

      he didn’t know the sound of his name,

      like talking to an oak.

      He’d fall in constant love

      with ravens & bluejays,

      then urge their perch

      on the crowns of scarecrows,

      thinking of himself

      as a conclusion

      of their wings.

      A woman stepped out of no-

      where, humpbacked, struggling

      with the moon. She asked me if

      I was lonely, if I was happy.

      Before I could lie, she said,

      “In many ways, you remind me

      of what’s-his-name, who sees poetry

      in the leaf. In the ugliest,

      smallest thing. He says katydids

      influence tongues. His hands are

      roots, his song a wolf’s lost

      in a cloud of migratory birds.”

      We wait to see you nail

      your voice to the floor.

      You stand in a doorway

      talking clothes off dreams.

      The groupie in the front row

      wears lavender stockings,

      & knows Blue Nun & Panama Red.

      She stares at the glass ceiling

      of crimson birds,

      as if you hide among rafters.

      You step up to the podium,

      drag on a cigarette, touch

      the half-dead microphone,

      & jazz leaps into your mouth.

      It sounds like you’ve lived

      dog days & slept in a hollowed log,

      as you lead us through orange

      groves, exposing white bones

      & drums buried under dirt.

       —for Robert Creeley

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