Maybe the Saddest Thing (6 page)

I think the superscript could read 1619.

I think the superscript could be the current year.

I think history is a linear accumulation.

M.

I think if math is wealth then wealth is history.

I think X marks a continent of loss.

I think the more you multiply the more you have.

I think so much depends on personal pronouns.

D.

I think the inverse of history is heritage.

I think heritage halved is power.

I think power has varied degrees.

I'm still thinking personal pronouns.

A.

I think who you are says a lot.

I think the second person implies two sides.

I think it says less plus less equals less.

I think it says more plus more equals more.

S.

I think deducting anything adds a negative sign.

I think the question equals more than five answers.

I think statistics can't fix quotes or crises.

I think this is problematic.

. . . 'cause his life is warfare.

—MOS DEF AND TALIB KWELI

You know those people who are uncomfortable

having a conversation at a comfortable level?

Like, you ask Tony his thoughts on Kobe

or the LA Lakers. And Tony responds:

Schwarzenegger ruined their state.

Four years in office and more debt than '03?

Come on, man. Fuck California.

Yeah. So Tony's my dad. He's retired

but doesn't know it. He thinks sleep is

death's first cousin. Early a.m.s

my brother and me tiptoe meandering routes

around our house, avoiding his line of sight.

These are the hours he tunes to AM talk.

Reads his paper where the stakes are high.

Two Decembers ago, my brother Brian and me.

We're sharing cognac sips and cigarillos

shooting stars in a powdered driveway

when dad breaks from the Al Sharpton Hour.

Tracks prints to basement floor. He starts in

on precipitation:
What type of grown-ass men

trek lines of snow through a house?

Me and your mama raised you better than that.

He shifts into hyperbole:
When you two start

having kids, I hope you take plenty of movies.

Your mama and me plan to kick back—watch

the decline of common courtesy.
Then Brian

makes a wrong move. Smiles. Says snow was

trailed in a square. Technically a half rhombus.

Pops leaves us. Leaves the earth:
Oh, so you

wanna joke about geometry? I hear scientists

developed a system for tracing racist thoughts.

Can you use your math on that?

Someone should make a drug to kill every last

bigot in the world. They should pump that shit

through the faucets.
Drunken laughs march Dad out.

In what world does he live? Michigan bigots

own bunkers. Unregistered land. And if I spent

one summer as a survey worker, if I phoned a woman

named Shanquita and assumed she lived in a hood,

is that intra-racist? Is it double-back racist to assume

you assume she was black? To assume you are not?

Would I be exempt from the ax? Could a black poet

fail the test? Let's say yes. Let's call my F a defect

of private schooling and exclusive subdivisions.

Let's call my death another gulp in the throat

of history's tireless typhoon, spinning backward.

I caught it like a shard of glass catches a beam.

How a stranger's smile can level a man. Can light

his sunken chest. Swell a new breath. In other words

I was the shard who glinted your eyes. In that light

blue halter, fifth hour, you were the poetry

I normally ignored. Your ballpoint's clean marks. Light

blue, light touch against my windbag essays. That made

you especially stunning. Made you lightening

I had to harness, hand in hand, beneath a desk. Or

in an unattended dark room. Tenderly, red light

washing over us. As I did. Abruptly—telling

you it takes the right type of girl to make a black-white

relationship work. You loved how Common rapped “The Light.”

I listened to him more than you. His sly anti–white

woman rhymes never touched me. But you. You filtered through

a magnifying glass. Warmed the cherry orchard, white

with frost. Your light sweetened my pit. You are lightning

crashed through his pulpit into this poem. Beaming. Yes, white.

A gleaming ax hacked through what we were growing into.

I was the ax. You were two syllables too many. White

space in a wheeling sonnet. A corner I couldn't turn

in nine lines. But now I am mourning. Thanks to you, first light.

Do I love you? Do I lust for you?

Am I a sinner because I do the two?

—A TRIBE CALLED QUEST

Because you introduced me to Wu-Tang

kung fu flicks,
Five Fingers of Death

&
36 Chambers

over quarter candy & sweet peach Faygo

pop on a playground bench.

Because you held my hand

as I cranked the boom box volume knob.

Because you lived next door to my boy B.

Because he slept through twelfth grade

to the tape-recorded husk of your voice.

Because he never graduated

he stayed home & mostly kicked it

with a hustler, turned third-shift grinder.

His name was D. He lived by you too.

B. got fed, turned out cool & normal.

Because I nodded to your chest's thump

under a rocket's trail of smoke

strong enough to trace every porch

couch, box spring & classroom in Kzoo.

Your cherry gloss lingered around

each Olde E bottle I downed.

Because I studied you in college.

I want you to sound bad.

Because you are mine.

Because I refuse to share

let's say you're an overwhelming

total body high.

Because your mouth

is the nectar & squish of a peach.

Because your lips are the color

of a flowering quince.

You ghost-rode your banana-seat

bike through my yard. Miss Bonita,

I caught your bug & couldn't kick it.

So wrap your cultured-up skull around this. I woke

to a red cross stenciled onto mismatched logs

and “The Entertainer” weeping from a black baby

grand—each note a hound dog's droopy ear. Hear

me when I say, I was lost. Stranded at a teen arts camp

so north in the UP I was hearing southern tongues.

Some flanneled blond man trailed a finger in the air.

Bumped cha head perdy good there. Reckon ya

twisted that ankle on this.
He aimed at my foot

with the bottom of a snapper's lacquered shell—

hazy compact, reflecting a dark, faceless me.
Am I

in heaven?
I asked. He cackled at that; shaking his

bronze leather face at the wall,
No, no. 'Least not like him.

My vision steadied on a hunchback boy in a yellowed white

tee as I rose from the cot. His erratic, thunderous sniffling

spooked words in my throat:
Is he going to be, all right?

—Oh yeah. That there's just my little boy, Tim. Been

carryin' on like that since a babe. Just a-cryin' and playin'

piano that way. Go'on over and say hello.

I joined the boy of five or six at the small black bench

and forced a nervous smile. Timmy's glassy blue eyes

kept time with a wooden metronome. His pupils shrank

and grew. Shrank and grew; dilating on each upbeat.

What if I said he wrapped my hands around his

wrist? Would you think me stoned as Snoop Dogg

at a slain rapper's wake if I told you he stared? That

he wept and played? You think I'm talking shit.

His pupil's penny-size screen flashed small

looped horrors: the snapper's shriveled head

lopped off with a Boy Scout knife; a muscled teen

pissing on an old, vagrant man, drooling snuff

on courthouse steps; the night clerk's nose stud

nailed to a bloody boot heel. You better believe

I bounced; hopped toward an exit. But Timmy

kept on playing, drilling notes into me

like a downpour thumping a well.

True story. The boy never left that room.

Go ahead. You can ask me how I know.

The edge I'm at is eleven feet high and safer than

the dirt lot below, where shattered glass doubles

as ground. Three rusted-out pickup trucks

have been outfitted with yellow steel boots

and stuffed with flames, igniting steady gusts

of ammonia—bodily and actual—a smell

inextricably related to the tear ducts that also

combusted here, and why I'm standing atop

a single-wide eyeing punched-in mobile home

darkness.     I'm thinking

about Grandmaster Flash. “The Message”:

an open row of a freshly set chessboard, bleak

beneath a pink, umbrella-donned table. And

the two rats, fat as badgers, schlepping around

a dog's charred carcass is the move I will make

to hurt you. It's 3 a.m. I just pulled off a Nowhere,

Indiana road to watch a trailer park smoke. A fist

of ash like nail polish scorched with salt blasts

me to my knees. Everything disintegrates

from this angle. Bit by bit. Like blacktop

sweating off layers in sun. Like police tape

singed with flame. From this point of view

soot cloaks stars. Even a white, grinning moon

finds its cheekbones eliminated here. I'm talking

about real lives and white rock rubble. Eyelids,

pocked with reddening cinder. Noses, eroded

and raw. I'm wondering if a face on fire

looks the same in any city. In any hue.

A phone rings an answering machine awake.

The trailing silence hearkens a boarded-up

project building. And in one great big empty

alleyway after another, people are boxed in

or burning up. Vanishing into thin air. Here

I am again, sketch pad in hand, glued to this spot

watching smoke stifle everything—white

and black chess pieces melting in slow mo.

& the mother cops a stiff

pull from the glass bong.

& murky water gurgling

in the bulb-like chamber

is barely heard but indistinctly

audible over Roy Ayers's

interstellar vibe. & smoke clouds

the bong's fat green neck

& glides down the woman's throat

into her belly