ELEGY

The frail pinwheels of fireflies
play out across the open meadow.
I draw my dark ancestor into a dance.
She cries against my shoulder,
recites a litany of dead names
that mean nothing to me;
a deaf-mute second cousin, a minister
who mended split-wood fences on the side,
a one-eyed sod farmer who bottled
personal misery. She asks my forgiveness
for all of them, but I am left
with open hands, too many
of my own mistakes, and the aching
code of dying light.

BIRTH DAY

The monkey dreams a radiant cacophony,
a kingdom of tendriled fronds and god’s teeth
gnashing the mulch of the world into creation.
The monkey sees the jungle he dreams
upon the jungle before his eyes.
The monkey dreams he is a monkey,
born of monkey, but more than monkey,
born this day, but every day, to arise.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: I

My body is humming, my body is humming,
cold angel glow of the dashboard, radio on,
empties tossed by the roadside.
This is the sound of surrender, glutted and tinkling.

I am only half-aware of the parts of myself
that are dying right now, for lack
of air and water and light.
What is left I wrap like a shroud
of monoxide around me.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: II

I glow with abandon, thirst,
and pray to those murky
rough voices behind the hedges
of the choir; those bitten,
spindley things warped for lack
of light and exposure, who sing
with voices of clear underground
streams, rattle roots in their
blackened hands—Oh, give me
something! All those starved
and bug-eyed, ferocious
with neglect, who are lost
in the naming and so grow stronger.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: III

Let the sky close down quarters.
Let the pumps and oxygen masks sputter.
Fear, paint me red, scurry my eyebrows
up to lightening rods. Caffeine, kick in,
blossom my capillaries. May my blood sing
wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, a fierce tide
flushing out the system.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: IV

Let us count the heartbeats of the living
and keep time by this to the Motown of Heaven.
That Wall of Sound Phil Spector envisioned,
still coming out of cheap radios,
on Formica countertops, on oldies stations.
Hear that? That song made me feel today
that I was drowning, and was glad for it.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: V

Somewhere, a bunch of sequined
black girls from Detroit are still singing,
their hair all curled alike, rigid waves
black as wax or glittering tarmac
after a rain. Singing the honey-sweet
failure of romance, so sweet
you want to start crying.

Like they were saying goodbye
to their childhoods, singing
to their crazy-mad boyfriends
who leave them for some stupid
teenage highway, Harleys, hot chrome
throbbing between thighs. But tears
streak the grease of his mechanic’s face.
He still has that song pounding in his head.
He still dreams hopelessly of deliverance.