Thursday, December 10, 2009

Brand New Retro, for Mound Bayou

The idea of 'always' in a Neruda poem struck at the nerve of the idea of 'never' in a poem I was working/through; an elegy for the Mississippi town, Mound Bayou. I joined the two poems in tilted Siamese, and got this.


Brand New Retro


Like lashes on a dark back, you were supposed to feel actual.

Cool, I did.

In 1919 there were 25 race riots across the country in seven months


But I refuse to accept despair as the final outcome of the ambiguities of these...
Hieroglyphics, which when you bent over their microscope pedestal, fell into the crypt

Collided

This town's foremost emblem of prosperity, its mill, has been turned into a dance hall

Pretty field of sharp husks and deacons reminds me of the early bribe, something dangling in sigh toned opal looks like my uncle, close enough

Though there is no such thing as resemblance any longer, just that the man hung like a flag or sheath or gone

Periscope maybe, voice is to color as

suspicion quickly escalates to conviction

cause we're covered in town and Nobody's business. Maybe, too clever, maybe

we failed at freedom on purpose cause discipline is the true decadence. With its prolific monogamy, ecstatic sacrifice for

look

at all the shepherds, they are never lonely, and the herd formations, so keen and strict, they are never lonely gazing at the swarm of their own black -maybe they are never lonely nor known

for the commitment to one thing, gathering, is so brave and radical a luxury... Even this far forward, I confused being a servant with being sure

Facing you
I am not jealous.

Come with a woman
at your back,
come with a hundred,
come with a thousand women between your chest and your feet,
and rivers


Bring them all
to where I wait for you:
it shall always be you and me
alone upon that earth,
starting