Shunting from Dakar to Casamance

I

A father takes it as his job to order:
rank the powers in the house

so the man o’ yard could slice
the crotons with the cutlass

how he gauged it, but couldn’t dark his
khaki-wearing self onto the porch;

there, the woman who did pressing
eased a drink to sun from shelter

through the grillwork’s diamond gaps,
sumptuous cold water or bebridge

but always in glass—for plastic
it was certified held germs

so all like fi-him outside mouth
can’t wet-wet people plastic things.

So glass it was or Panther-tasting
water from the hose.

So rank began with who was most
land-close even in a house like ours,

no great design to it: a box of slabs
schemed out on old horse farm

and a bygone orange grove where slavery
kept imagination ligatured

to bias more than law. My father’s skin
was pale-beige-watered Scotch.

My mother’s blood was part Maroon
she used to boast.

Should kids be embarrassed by
the grown-ups they become?

To us mid in class and tone
our mother’s brag said yes,

I was inked wicked, had a story
with an opening in the bush.

Phantom’s Skull Cave in comics.
Drive-in newsreels’ sunk eyes,

zinc ribs, bloat, tuft hair.
Guerillas or gorillas at war.

She top-ranked my father, whom
she called in public ‘‘dunce police,’’

and when he was demoted further
through divorce she just straight-ruled.

Her white tunic made her handsome,
her laughter lit dispensaries and

brought mint coolness to damp wards,
but home she ran it like a capo:

charismatic, loving, then would punch
you if you fucked up like a thug.

If she caught you in a lie she’d
call you to the night porch,

you’d gauge the cutlass-ordered crotons’
silhouette, the argyle pattern grill

then out of air that slow bloom menthol
marking where she slumped.

You trembled when she started:
‘‘Mr. Bitch . . .’’

 

II

How it goes with me—sea calls
and I go to it, not obedient—

with the taut awareness of the archer
who’s heard fusillade, bluster call of notes,

or when the cellist looks up,
sees conductor’s eyelids droop,

and titivates the bow. It’s a string thing,
this hurt, tendon-wound not muscles bound;

and what draws it out of me a little is
the big resilience, ocean of whatever color

cutting itself again and again
salt already rubbed into the wounds.

A posture comes with this witness.
Spine believes it is its doing

but my tendons know. Sometimes they lie
to the ligaments so when I see a boat

way out I feel if I had the pomegranate
switch I used to knot with sisal as a boy,

something sonorous would drain
from a body flung to deck

shocked by whittle arrow on the far skyline
shocked as I was when she’d summon

and for fuck-ups forgotten
licks would fletch my ass.

 

III

When I leave her after visits and we
hug in Stamford’s near-sea cold

I’m startled always that she’s small,
by her skin’s flatness—

versus memory, a confusing timbre,
lost sheen tone. The lobby of her pricey

condo is awash with all the foolery
rising tidal every time we meet.

She always says I love you, a habit
picked up on the way to 85.

I’m always struck by change and aging.
On the long drive up the coast

through towns with hope hollowed
linked by some took-for-granted bridge,

I regard with pleasure that endures:
the tall blond grass of autumn;

in winter, fields that float on fog and snow;
summer and the Boston-bound Acelas

on the metal Malecón between the highway
and the beach; spring’s floral glory,

all New England variegated like
the crotons ordered by the man o’ yard

to euphemize the fence. I console
myself sometimes with ‘‘pictures,’’

her lingo carried over to my home:
Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York,

Scorcese-odes to order, belonging,
violence evangelistic, arch retorts,

dead-body tableaus, virtuosic shootouts,
first-chair gunmen in death’s chamber,

all those raised neck strings.
When she calls with tender need

to ask if I’m safe how come I didn’t call
I dote, wonder if she’ll figure how

my not-call is summons, how
once summoned how differently she talks.

Sometimes as she pads from range—
to guestroom—our voices echo,

fray as she draws us once again
into the shell she’d been huxed from mollusk-y

in a village by a shore; there, a nameless
river close to where they’ve built a Sandals now

would gouache an aqua sea. Near there
her squat beige mother

cast her down. ‘‘She never love me. Not at all.
She cuss me black.’’

I knew her. Sister Lyn . . . Miss Minto,
Grandma. Always nice to me.

 

IV

Shunting from Dakar to Casamance
I stopped along a coast, got out,

cocked heels on the hood to get leg tendons
stretched. I love driving, real driving, stick shifts

and curves and herds of a sudden turning roads
to furry ponds; the unreliability of shafts

and pistons, thus reliance on my ears
to suss which betrayal of bearings, rings

or rods and gears may come.
I inhabit vehicles like a mollusk.

I don’t drive cars—I put them on.
Armored, I approach the world.

That time in Casamance I was morose.
In Petit Kassa I’d eaten brilliant

at a cafe run by whites and guilt
could not console me from

from a salad’s poised insistent tart,
leaves, some unknown to me,

spooned with unremake-able vinaigrette.
All outside the eatery my mother,

shape, skin, hair, smile, low-bridge
nose, slight eyes.

Like the coast of New England,
there were many rivers being seduced

by dreams of being sea and they moved
with purpose for the interview while

mangroves stayed above the drama,
like old heads, just watched.

I stood seaside. Tied pirogues
in front of me were rinds cast off,

bobbling orange, melon, prongonat,
as Jamaican pomegranates are called;

beyond this slight armada, vastness
gray-blue, collaborating Atlantic westbound.

And I remembered a ska loved by my mother,
a ska by Drummond, Eastern Standard Time,

and I recalled a poem I wrote for her,
Fugue in Ten Movements: Kingston 1955,

then came visitation from this chat
I’d had with Tommy, Drummond’s bredrin

dead now, voice as absolute and present
as a sky unrolls a curtain and it’s fog.

Cuban-timbre trombonista used to shuffle
down to placid Kingston harbor

in crepe Dunlops near the prison,
play waltzes with the waves.

And when I thought of this I thought
of how self-harming and the ready-sutures

of the ocean could be scores if I chose so,
scores not settled but turned,

and so it was I found myself at blue
mystery miming Drummond,

an imagined porkpie angled so the brim
was like a far out pirogue’s lifting arrowed prow

as I shadowboxed a history and a sea,
a town, a watershed, a continent behind me

as I punched: bag-body heavyweight
or Jab Jab doing a jook workout,

Diable, Diable, grown-up devil boy.
On the road to Ziguinchor,

I thought why mum loved Drummond.
Did she hear that cello-sorrow in his tone?