Mystic

A two-pound weight, hurled toward the sky,

meant to break another, found Harriet Tubman,

collided with her skull at the dry-goods store.

Harriet: a hairsbreadth from no more—from the end

of her. It splintered bone, that iron stone, barely bigger

than an egg or baby foot. So put, it drove the fabric

of her head-rag home, deep enough to touch her mind.

A madness. Not a man to be kind, her enslaver

would say: Not worth a sixpence. She was thirteen

and, thereafter, she’d feel starlight descending,

the herald of a voice like a bell or a chime.

A sweep of slumber would take her then, even as

she spoke, though she woke wounded and weary,

breathing and seeing long into time. Crossing, often,

a Manhattan street, without the protection

of the throng, without so much as a turn of my head,

fool girl I was, just wishing herself dead, erased

by a taxi at 50 miles an hour. A dare without

dread, though no small power, I’d dared myself

since thirteen or so. To go and go now: a madness of

my own. No cataclysmic crash on the side of my skull,

just the want of a pill, just chemistry, and thoughts that

moved through me in metaphor: a door to close

or not as I chose. Harriet and her crew of renegades,

they’d march close, in nothing but rags, a mockery of

clothes. They stepped into the blessed black and

wicked frost, the stars blue-flaming the waters

they’d wade. Always a river to be followed or crossed,

though there was no promise of blanket or barn or bed.

Just God telling her go and go now from inside

her head, among the night blooms and night birds.

I had a madwoman to disarm, a dweller in my attic

with a shotgun on her arm and a way with her words.

Araminta—African lady, with eyes that pierce the mist—

you yield to prayer and to a voice and to a godly pain.

The price you paid for having no choice; the price

of the railroad with a flesh-made train.

Moses, they’d say, Moses got the charm.