Ancestral Memory

When the coming of another grave

jabs at me like harvest, stolen. And the flame

inside consumes. The uneasy hand of the sun

approaching. What was, given back by night.

When a body ascends away from reason,

a name is a form of oblation. Like ash, like loss

to the goddess of lost things, I fear

the belonging that ranks. I’m sorry,

I have held the few smooth lines I come from

in the way of a rooster, talon tied to blade.

Yes, belonging is a lie I tell

like any official crowd, something to hem

restlessness. A sock’s taut elastic waiting

for the day it goes to sag: trouble

in my own bones for a short flat time.

The digging I need in storm. This glory of tears,

I bind my pain, my labor to something else.

ii

For those days you pocket-dial your cousin,

kapwatid long since drowned. For those moments

when feathers of your hope

are a bother stuck at lips. For those

whose desolation has the texture of silt, of velour

against the nerves. For days you cannot thank

your sweat: down to a toenail,

your presence is worth the awe I reserve

for newfound constellations, opening

the narrow sky above a single wall.

Coffee, toothbite, styrofoam. Styrofoam and cargo.

Outside the train stop, a hawk: how it glances upside

then side to side between each pulling

redsplash bite of fallen pigeon. Do you also stare

into the crankled dark absorbed by windows—

praying a deity of lost things might visit—

bloom your fingers at their ghosts?

Then you might feel dizzy. Here, a spell:

whether giant lavender or dwarf wisteria,

whether cedar or banyan tree, fruit-

bearing or root, concrete, quarried rock,

or arkipelago, say body, say love. May you feel easy

in your skin. May the language of ancestors

tattoo the ground you walk on,

back from all the places where their failings

gather as a congregation of mercies.

iii

I, too, have been losing my gentleness

since the first young wound. What is thick:

the cold, the doses of exclusion, the generous

human contribution to earthly hurt, the song

that pulls me from the knot of my mouth

back toward searching the low round hills

in my only soul. My monster is a bargain,

despair dropped easy like antelope meat

into the boiling pot. It simmers

like migration, multiplies

my shadows. Reduce me to desire

in my brown-boy sidewalk stance,

down from contempt in an idling car

my tightening body remembers best.

The beat was four-four time enough

to nod at first, dipped how dreams dip

into the earth. Counting the insults

alive in your ear, the collapses,

the collapses, counting them now

grow small. Enough to hear

your body—into the groove—

expand. The stars, the city lights

who swallow them: they do not leave you,

but gleam. Like oil spill and candle

glut—like a forest burning.

I am desperate for a language to hold me

as does a water crossroads: between gravel

shimmering in the transparent above the gravel.

What is sharp and thin in me, I carry.

Like you carry: the strength

you save: the mischief you will wear again

when you return: to this place

where all that has seen famine

returns. If each day is orphan

and river to a goddess of  lost things,

as my lament also dies down to whisper

curved, horned like a dawn that knows

death, light flow into the ladle you offer—

as a seed’s journey to harvest, reaching—I drink.