Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth Read online

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  TO MY DAUGHTERS AND GRANDDAUGHTER:

  KIMBERLY, SHOSHANA, AND IMANI

  MOJO SONGS

  (NEW POEMS)

  A WORLD OF DAUGHTERS

  Say licked clean at birth. Say

  weeping in the tall grass, where

  this tantalizing song begins,

  birds paused on a crooked branch

  over a grave of an unending trek

  into the valley of cooling waters.

  Lessons of earth, old questions

  unmoor the first tongue. Say

  I have gone back, says the oracle,

  counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault

  lines between one generation & next,

  as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen,

  & one glimpses what one did not know. Say

  this is where the goat was asked to speak

  legends ago, to kneel & deliver a sacrifice.

  To feel a truth depends on how & why

  the singer’s song fits into the mouth.

  Well, I believe the borrowed-rib

  story is the other way round, entangled

  in decree, blessing, law, & myth. One

  only has to listen to nightlong pleas

  of a mother who used all thousand

  chants & prayers of clay, red ocher

  blown from the mouth upon the high

  stone wall, retracing a final land bridge

  to wishbone. My own two daughters

  & granddaughter, the three know how

  to work praise & lament, ready to sprout

  wings of naked flight & labor. Yes,

  hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy

  to clan, from clan to tribe, & today

  we worship her sun-polished bones,

  remembering she is made of questions.

  No, mama is not always a first word

  before counting eggs in the cowbird’s

  nest. It begins in memory. Now, say

  her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.

  OUR SIDE OF THE CREEK

  We piled planks, sheets of tin,

  & sandbags across the creek

  till the bright water rose

  & splayed both sides,

  swelling into our hoorah.

  Our hard work brought July

  thrashers & fat June bugs

  in decades of dead leaves.

  Water moccasins hid in holes

  at the brim of the clay bank

  as the creek eased up pelvic

  bones, hips, navel, & chest,

  to eyelevel. When the boys

  dove into our swim hole

  we pumped our balled fists

  to fire up their rebel yells.

  The Jim Crow birds sang

  of persimmon & mayhaw

  after a 12-gauge shotgun

  sounded in the mossy woods.

  If we ruled the day an hour

  the boys would call girl cousins

  & sisters, & they came running

  half naked into a white splash,

  but we could outrun the sunset

  through sage & rabbit tobacco,

  born to hide each other’s alibis

  beneath the drowned sky.

  SLINGSHOT

  A boy’s bicycle inner tube

  red as inside the body,

  a well-chosen forked limb

  sawed from a shrub oak,

  & then an hour-long squint

  to get it right. The taut pull is

  everything. There’s nothing

  without resistance, & the day

  holds. The hard, slow, steady

  honing flips a beetle on its back,

  but the boy refuses to squash it.

  He continues with his work.

  Summer rambles into a quiet

  quantum of dogwood & gum—

  a girl he’s too shy to tell his name

  stands in damp light nearing dark,

  & biting a corner of his lip

  he whittles the true stock,

  knowing wrong from right.

  Though Pythagoras owned

  a single truth, the boy

  untangles a triangle of pull

  within a triangle of release,

  the slingshot’s tongue a tongue

  torn out of an old army boot,

  & Lord, what a perfect fit.

  Feet spread apart, the boy

  straddles an imaginary line,

  settling quietly into himself

  as the balance & pull travel

  down through his fingers,

  forearm, elbow, into muscle,

  up through his shoulder blades,

  neck, mouth, set of the jaw,

  into the register of the brain,

  saying, Take a breath & exhale

  slowly, then let the stone fly

  as if it has swallowed a stone,

  & that is when the boy knows

  his body is a compass, a cross.

  A PRAYER FOR WORKERS

  Bless the woman, man, & child

  who honor earth by opening shine

  inside the soil—the splayed hour

  between dampness & dust—to plant

  seedlings in double furrows, & then pray

  for cooling rain. Bless the fields,

  the catch, the hunt, & the wild fruit,

  & let no one go hungry tonight

  or tomorrow. Let the wind & birds

  seed a future ferried into villages

  & towns the other side of mountains

  along nameless rivers. Bless those

  born with hands made to grapple

  hewn timbers & stone raised from earth

  & shaped in circles, who know the geometry

  of corners, & please level the foundation

  & pitch a roof so good work isn’t diminished

  by rain. Bless the farmer with clouds

  in his head, who lugs baskets of dung

  so termites can carve their hives

  that hold water long after a downpour

  has gone across the desert & seeds

  sprout into a contiguous greening.

  Bless the iridescent beetle working

  to haul the heavens down, to journey

  from red moondust to excrement.

  The wage slave two-steps from Dickens’s

  tenements among a den of thieves,

  blind soothsayers who know shambles

  where migrants feathered the nests

  of straw bosses as the stonecutters

  perfect profiles of robber barons

  in granite & marble in town squares

  along highways paved for Hollywood.

  Bless souls laboring in sweatshops,

  & each calabash dipper of water,

  the major & minor litanies & ganglia

  dangling from promises at the mou
th

  of the cave, the catcher of vipers at dawn

  in the canebrake & flowering fields,

  not for love of money but for bread

  & clabber on a thick gray slab table,

  for the simple blessings in a hamlet

  of the storytellers drunk on grog.

  Bless the cobbler, molding leather

  on his oaken lasts, kneading softness

  & give into a red shoe & a work boot,

  never giving more to one than the other,

  & also the weaver with closed eyes

  whose fingers play the ties & loops

  as if nothing else matters, daybreak

  to sunset, as gritty stories of a people

  grow into an epic stitched down

  through the ages, the outsider artists

  going from twine & hue, cut & tag,

  an ironmonger’s credo of steam rising

  from buckets & metal dust, & the clang

  of a hammer against an anvil,

  & the ragtag ones, a whole motley crew

  at the end of the line, singing ballads

  & keeping time on a battered tin drum.

  THE CANDLELIGHT LOUNGE

  All the little doors unlock

  in the brain as the saxophone

  nudges the organ & trap drums

  till an echo of the Great Migration

  tiptoes up & down the bass line.

  Faces in semi-dark cluster around

  a solo, edging toward a town of steel

  & car lines driven by conveyor belts.

  But now only a sign stutters across

  the Delaware, saying, Trenton Makes

  The World Takes. With one eye

  on the players at the Candlelight

  & the other on televised Olympians

  home is a Saturday afternoon

  around the kidney-shaped bar.

  These songs run along dirt roads

  & highways, crisscross lonely seas

  & scale mountains, traverse skies

  & underworlds of neon honkytonk,

  wherever blues dare to travel.

  A swimmer climbs a diving board

  in Beijing, does a springy toe dance

  on the edge, turns her head

  toward us, & seems to say, Okay,

  you guys, now see if you can play this.

  She executes a backflip,

  a triple spin, a half twist,

  held between now & then,

  & jackknifes through the water,

  & it is what pours out of the horn.

  SHELTER

  Becky grew up in the provinces of the blackest, richest Delta silt this side of cut & run. When the wind rampaged in from the east she could taste the soil, & naturally it was biblical. The boy came one June morning to work on her daddy’s egg farm. Both were fourteen—he three days older than she. His job was to feed the two-thousand-odd white leghorn hens, to gather the pearly ovals in baskets & carry them to the grading shed where Stella cleaned off flecks of shit & held each egg up to a beaming light, then placed them into white dozen-size papery cartons. Sometimes Becky worked beside the tall black woman for the fun of it, mirroring her moves. Also, she liked looking at the boy gathering the eggs. But they didn’t dare let anyone else see their catlike eyes. In their four years of stolen kisses they grew into each other. They’d lie in the tall grass, trembling in an embrace. But one day the boy enlisted in the army. Stella would say, “Miz Becky, I know a lady who can take that spell off ya.” Of course, Becky would say, “I don’t know what you talkin ’bout, Stella.” A year later, Becky married Buster Collins from across the river. The couple built a nice brick bungalow two miles down the road. She kept saying, “Buster, I wanna baby.” Three years passed. The boy came back. He began driving a tractor & trailer across country. To this day Becky can’t say why she slipped Stella the note to give him. When the setting sun lights the door of the hayloft. The two began to meet. It didn’t make sense, they both declared. But one night they caught themselves in the bedroom while Buster sat in the living room watching championship wrestling, drinking his bottles of Dixie. The boy almost called Buster’s name. He whispered to Becky, “Never again.” She pounded her fists against his chest, saying, “Over my dead body.” That was the night she ran from the bedroom crying. That was the night she told the sheriff the window was open but she only heard bullfrogs in the gully before she felt his knife at her throat. She didn’t holler because she saw murder in his eyes. When the sheriff & his two deputies stopped the truck at the state line, the sheriff said, “Boys, looka here, a dead nigger drivin a big fancy rig to hell.” He didn’t try telling them his side of the story. If he had, they would’ve killed him on the spot. Mayflies clogged the air. They dragged him bloody into a jail cell. A hoot owl called. Just before daybreak the mob appeared. The sheriff handed over the keys. Years later, after what happened, his name was the answer to an unspeakable divination. It had something to do with a tin coffee can of charred bones & ashes in a shoebox of dried rose petals. Becky said there are legends that eat graveyard clay, though she never could wrap her mind ’round that one. She caught a sundown Greyhound headed north & thought of Stella’s drinking gourd. Its orangey-gold hue. Now, she sits on a midnight curb in a ghetto, beckoning to whatever danger walks near, still trying to decide what Billie Joe McAllister & that girl tossed off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Was it life or death? Or some damnable other something, a heavy lodestone? Becky always had an imagination to die for. Hadn’t that song showed her feet the highway? Now, after all these years, all the other stories were balled up in hers. She gazes up crook-eyed at the sky, a Delta sunset tamped down into her bones, & now a limp easing into her left leg.

  THE MUSHROOM GATHERERS

  The hard work of love sealed

  in language has stolen me far

  from home, from the fields,

  & I see morning mist rising

  where they borrow ghosts

  to get even with each other,

  harvesting vegetable & fruit

  close as we can get to dirt.

  I glimpse shadows smudged

  in trees lining the highway

  where night & day commingle,

  or as a season moves this slow hour,

  saying, Bad things happened here.

  At first, the figures seem to be

  staring into earth, like migrants

  who work Florida & California,

  unearthing what we live to eat.

  We know the men from women

  by the colors they wear, sweat

  ringing their lives in gray shade,

  & our bus makes the mushroom

  gatherers with pails & canvas bags

  blur among the trees as if shutters

  are opening & closing, as the mind

  runs to keep up. But the road forks

  here in eastern Europe, & I hardly

  can see faces in the door of leaves.

  The women know where to stand

  in the clearing, how each trucker

  slows down to make the curve,

  & cannot miss yellow or purple.

  He honks his loud bluesy horn,

  idling at the bottom of the hill

  on a thin shoulder of blacktop.

  AFTER THE BURN PITS

  The battle begins here as I slap my chest

  with the palm of my hand, a talking drum

  under the skin. It’s hard to believe men

  once marched into fire blowing bagpipes

  & fifes. Thunder & lightning can disarm us

  like IEDs & RPGs. We say to ourselves,

  Keep a cool head, & don’t forget the pass

  & review. Salute the dead but don’t linger.

  The rank & file are you & I. But mother of

  courage knows the weight of ammo belts,

  to zigzag across dunes & around acacias,

  & to never forget the smell of a burn pit.

  Draw down face
s of battle on a sketch pad.

  But the pigment of ink-jets will never be

  blood & skin worked into an anthem.

  The drawings dare us to step closer, to look

  into our eyes reflected in the glass, framed

  by the camera’s automatic mind. To follow

  songs of the Highwaymen is one way not

  to fight oneself in a parade of mirrors.

  To lie down in a desert & not think war,

  white grains on the skin. To question

  is to be human. To interrogate shadows

  or go into terrain & unweave the map.

  To lag over the small moments ferries us

  across rivers. To stand naked before a mirror

  & count the parts is to question the whole

  season of sowing & reaping thorns.

  THE MOUNTAIN

  In the hard, unwavering mountain

  light, black flags huddle at the foot of the mountain.

  Hours are days & nights, a ragged map

  of hungry faces trapped on the mountain.

  But silence swears help is on its way,

  formations rolling toward the mountain.

  Blood of the sacred yew & stud goat

  beg repose midpoint of the mountain

  & prayers rise in August’s predawn gruff.

  Artillery halts at the foot of the mountain.

  Help is on its way, but don’t question

  the music burning toward the mountain.

  Infidels size up their easy targets, flying

  skull & bone as villainy scales the mountain.

  It could be a beautiful day but black flags

  throng around the base of the mountain.

  The red-wing kite has come to pinpoint

  a medieval hour, circling the mountain.

  Men, women, & children change rags of rebirth

  lost in the double shadow of the mountain,

  & a ghost of gunmetal drones overhead

  & slowly turns, translating the mountain,

  then stops midair, before drumming down

  the black flags at the foot of the mountain.

  DEAD RECKONING III

  They work fingers to bone, & borrow

  smudged paper, then make promises

  to family, unmerciful gods, the unborn.

  Some eat a favorite meal three times

  in a row. Others partake only a pinch