Dear Dad,
I found the big purple grapes with the seeds in them, just like the ones we used to share out on the porch before you lost your voice and I lost my appetite. Organic too. Two lifetimes ago. The first bite brought tears to my eyes. Could be the way the tambourines and tender harp strings in the chants I've been listening to on Alice Coltrane's Transcendence, through huge encompassing headphones, could be the way those insistent tones mingle with the silent almost mimed grasp of my tentative bite and time my ambivalent cells for reaction, rational pleasure. I know none such. What about the communities and minds in which the idea of longing is being reproduced all the time? What about that memory erases the chalk off your silhouette again.
The other day I hung out with an Italian friend, writer, one of Amiri Baraka's old friends. We talked about the subtle revolution of releasing his collected poems in time for Black History Month. I was a little crestfallen by that cold capital precision, and then yes, we got to the topic of children, Amiri's 9 children. The way this man put it, one was by "a re-educated hooker." I looked on unphased. A "re-educated hooker" who had been living in the basement of the home he shared with his wife and children when they conceived this child, whom he took in and raised as his own, for this was his own. I once heard him say abortion is genocide for members of the African diaspora in the US, that no matter what. There's something about it I find heroic. There's no scandal to boast of there. It's beyond scandal. There's no landless population or listless copulation or say what you want Imma raise all my children to the royal hemisphere and back again from now until after the last sky I am, I could hear Amiri thinking, what is wrong with groovin? What is wrong with groovin?
And back in the globe of these grapes, I've lost my appetite for tension. I've stopped pretending I can't see the past like future and I see them side by side approaching their favorite porch to tell a wide mobility into the stillness. It may have been the ruthlessness that brought us to our respective voices, it may be, it will be, it is, we demand it thus, to a new sense of what the present time might be, to the empathy that some dispersions might be, to the silent fable of a seed.
The steepest love,
Harmony
