Explore Poems: Disappointment

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat…

was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping? The mother, tearing her hair out, running toward the battle lines, filling heaven...

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can’t come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books...

You’ve never seen a lilac in Mississippi.
Backstage you wear lotion laced with
its chemical imitation. A ballet mistress
says relevé always as command: lift
onto the toe using only the heel.
Your ankle’s bewilderment
old as the horned owl gaze from
your mother hunched in the...

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

            its a secrete

            the grls speeching mye hole  /

            inn 2 the lindens  /  wee go out

        & playe footballe  /  verie nashenallie

        how wee leeve a stall  /  piteus

                    wen the grls

                    speech me  /
 
this is how u make a porno   /    ...

It’s a shame this poem’s already been erased when
I go to read it. Like humid air that tugs
at my arm to catch what will fall, is
falling, and falls. What’s up with erasing? Glue,
scissors, and yarn make a shadow of barbed
wire....

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted—
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                     ...

In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...

Spike Lee is so small I didn’t even
see him at first, surrounded

by Black Expo goers like a gumdrop
in a fist. When I asked him to sign

my “Free South Africa” t-shirt,
he said, You didn’t buy that at this

booth. Fresh off seeing Do...

There is no stillness in this wood.
The quiet of this clearing
Is the denial of my hearing
The sounds I should.

There is no vision in this glade.
This tower of sun revealing
The timbered scaffoldage is stealing
Essence from shade.

Only my love is love’s ideal....

You are the problem I propose,
My dear, the text my musings glose:
I call you for convenience love.
By definition you’re a cause
Inferred by necessary laws—
You are so to the saints above.
But in this shadowy lower life
I sleep with a terrestrial wife
And...

The wish to climb a ladder to the loft
Of God dies hard in us. The angels Jacob saw

Were not himself. Bramble is what grows best
Out of this man-scarred earth, and I don’t chop it back

Till the fruit have ripened. Yesterday I...

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

Nothing worth noting
except an Andromeda
with quadrangular shoots—
            the boots
of the people

wet inside: they must swim
to church thru the floods
or be taxed—the blossoms
            from the bosoms
of the leaves


*


Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
            my clarity
with me.


*


Hear
where her snow-grave is
the You
            ah you
of...

As a child I knew I was
good,
adorable,
and safe.
Because that was what my parents told me,
that was what my grandma told me,
that was what my physical therapist told me,
that was what my teachers told me.
So I believed it.
I rolled around in...

Head tilted back, eyes to the light, I squeeze single tears of moisturizer from the glass jar: forehead, cheek, cheek, a cross, martyr mystic blessing that promises to unblemish me.

//

After the hospital everyone brought facemask sheets. In meager bursts of...

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the sculpture...

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies,...

We were so poor.
The air was a quiver
of thoughts we drew from

to poise, unsaid
in the ineffable
world we lived in.

Sun, scarcely a penny
in that dreary setting,
every night gave up

to a smog-strewn avalanche
of searchlights, crossing
the heavens, a bicker

to buy a new used...