Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa Wesleyan Poetry Series

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      He walks ahead

      of the man. His

      chain drags on the ground,

      clanking a song of dark colors

      in the acid air. He

      knows where he’s going;

      echoing blood cells

      in the man’s head,

      his imagination a quail

      among dirty words.

      The mind’s anchored to a stone.

      Dandelion wine grows bittersweet

      in the musty cellars. The old

      beat-up Buick’s a buffalo,

      drinking cries of coyotes

      as it stumbles toward a beginning.

      The land eats itself, a half-mile

      into the heart. Sage blooms in the heads

      of Billy the Kid & Jesse James.

      I hope the road hurries to Denver.

      Here, even the gully-brown jackrabbit

      gets a dirty deal. Buntings lay low

      among the rocks where tumbleweed

      stakes claim. Any moment the sky

      could leap open as the body

      settles into itself like a stone

      tossed into a lake. You’re safe

      with knives & Front Range daybreak.

      I’m spellbound by the mountains,

      a woman dropping her last veil.

      You can pull off back roads

      astonished with honeysuckle

      & Virginia rails in marsh grass.

      In Oven Fork, they know how to witch

      for water deep as stars underground.

      Here, rough men know how

      to handle iron & die hard

      in blue vaults of racial memory.

      Under villanelles of pleated dresses

      women forget flesh. In Black Mountain

      Coleman headlanterns tunnel through

      the mole’s tombed season.

      The sharecropper’s wife

      stands in unharvested

      stillness. Her womb

      turned inside out by God’s

      grief. She kneels beside

      a newly-dug bodyhole,

      & her man hands her

      the black handkerchief.

      Suck dove meat from the bones,

      tallyho around the electric fence

      of this guardhouse.

      Pin medals to chests. Our shadows

      sleep in the ground, old combat boots

      laced on the feet of the dead.

      For as long as I can remember

      men have sewn their tongues

      to the roofs of their mouths.

      I want to forget everything.

      I want to pull the venetian blinds

      & extinguish the lights. Sometimes

      six high-stepping boots

      emerge from the sumac thicket

      toward this unlit house. Six

      black boots kick at my front door

      till a vase of periwinkles overturns

      & rolls under the bed.

      A spray of glass covers

      the middle of next year.

      A hunting knife arcs the air.

      I’m a smashed violin covered with dust,

      & rise to drip red leaves down streets.

      Foster child of ragweed,

      can you hear grain

      silos opening in the night?

      Where the sun’s a dirt farmer’s

      good-luck timepiece,

      yucca drips white

      & the afternoon forecasts

      irony. Dust-bowl

      people disappear walking

      toward rain, in August

      thickets of magenta thistle.

      When you enter the town

      voices of children will stone you

      till your clothes are rags.

      Mr. Ditch Commissioner

      of La Acequia Del Llano,

      did you know a gopher hole

      can swallow a man?

      Teenyboppers crowd No Exit.

      Lep Zeppelin & illegal

      shadows. I hate words

      burning twist lemon menthol 100s.

      No, nothing I say can stop them

      from splitting themselves open

      like those honeydew melons

      I saw last summer

      driving the midwest.

      They clap hands & laugh

      like Sam River’s sax,

      dancing the rose’s perfect vernacular

      as they push their lives into streets

      on the tongues of men.

      you are the third term

      carried to the fourth power of numbers

      two steps overlooked inbetween

      colors of night-burning sky

      a priori light blue of your dress

      our faces everything except

      against odds of self-discovery

      we find our bodies locked

      together in a room of breath

      threefold at the rotting threshold

      divided into ontogenetic questions

      a fluke of radio waves in the storm

      the song that uses up our lives.

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