Trojan Poetry 110: Danez Smith and Natasha Tretheway

alternate names for black boys

by Danez Smith

1.   smoke above the burning bush

2.   archnemesis of summer night

3.   first son of soil

4.   coal awaiting spark & wind

5.   guilty until proven dead

6.   oil heavy starlight

7.   monster until proven ghost

8.   gone

9.   phoenix who forgets to un-ash

10. going, going, gone

11. gods of shovels & black veils

12. what once passed for kindling

13. fireworks at dawn

14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

15. (I thought to leave this blank

       but who am I to name us nothing?)

16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint

17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

Source: Poetry (March 2014)

Enlightenment

By Natasha Trethewey

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

        at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

        darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

        he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

        to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

he's just uttered some final word.

        The first time I saw the painting, I listened

as my father explained the contradictions:

how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out

        of necessity, my father said — had to own

slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

he could not have fathered those children:

        would have been impossible, my father said.

For years we debated the distance between

word and deed. I'd follow my father from book

        to book, gathering citations, listening

as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

        a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater

than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

I did not know then the subtext

        of our story, that my father could imagine

Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —

the improvement of the blacks in body

        and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

with the whites — or that my father could believe

he'd made me better. When I think of this now,

        I see how the past holds us captive,

its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:

my young father, a rough outline of the old man

        he's become, needing to show me

the better measure of his heart, an equation

writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

        Now, we take in how much has changed:

talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

How white was she? — parsing the fractions

        as if to name what made her worthy

of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,

quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

        Imagine stepping back into the past,

our guide tells us then — and I can't resist

whispering to my father: This is where

        we split up. I'll head around to the back.

When he laughs, I know he's grateful

I've made a joke of it, this history

        that links us — white father, black daughter —

even as it renders us other to each other.

Natasha Trethewey, "Enlightenment" from Thrall. Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Trojan Poetry 109: "Spring Comes to Chicago" by Campbell McGrath

Spring Comes to Chicago

by Campbell McGrath

All through those final, fitful weeks we walked off the restlessness of our daily

expectancy on the avenues of sun-hunger and recalcitrant slush.

When would that big fat beautiful baby

Blue first day of spring arrive?

So we strolled the backstreets and boulevards to consider the clouds and drink

some decaf and escape the press of solicitous voices, gingerly, leaving feathers

unruffled, like that first, fearless pair of mallards coasting the lake’s archipelagoes

of melting ice. We walked to the movies, again and again - Eddie Murphy at the

Biograph, Orson Welles amid the Moorish splendor of the Music Box - varying

our route until we knew every block in the neighborhood, every greystone and

three-flat, every Sensei bar and Michoaqueno flower stall.

We walked to Ho Wah Garden and the Ostoneria and over to Becky’s for deep-

dish pizza;

to Manny’s for waffles on mornings of aluminum rain;

the German butcher for bratwurst, the Greek bakery for elephant ears, the 7-Eleven

for cocktail onions to satisfy Elizabeth’s idiosyncratic cravings.

We walked until our fears resurfaced and then ate out fears.

We walked ourselves right out of winter into precincts we knew and those we

didn’t and some the city kept as private enclaves for itself, a certain statue, a

street of saris, an oasis of cobbled lanes amid the welter of industry where

suddenly the forsythia is in lightning-fierce flower, sudden as lilac, as bells, as

thunder rolling in from the plains, sky a bruised melon spawning ocean-green

hailstones to carry our rusted storm gutters away in an avalanche of kerneled ice

plastered with bankrolls of last year’s leaves.

Behold the daffodil, behold the crocus!

Behold the awakened, the reborn, the already onrushing furious and blooming;

violets overgrown in the lawn gone back to prairie,

some trumpet-flowered vine exuding sweet ichor upon the vacant house across

the street,

dandelions blown to seed

and the ancient Japanese widows who stoop to gather their vinegar-bitter stems.

That final morning we clear the cobwebs and crack the storm windows and let the

breeze take shelter in our closets and to bask all day in its muddy immutable

odor. Elizabeth naps in a chair by the window, attuned to the ring of a distant

carrillon, matins and lauds, while down the block an unnumbered hoard of

rollerblades and bicycles propel their messengers like locusts assembled at the toll

of some physiological clock, the ancient correlation of sap and sunlight,

equinoctial sugar and blood. The big elm has begun its slow adumbration of

fluted leaflets and buds on branch tips, percussive nubs and fine-veined tympani,

a many-fingered symphony tuning up.

Vespers: swallows and doves;

Elizabeth takes a final stitch in her tiny welcome blanket; yawns; done.

Bodies and hours, bodies and hours.

At midnight I close the book on final grades to find my desk alive with a host of

translucent, freshly-fledged spiders, a microscopic multitude borne in on the

breeze to take up residence among the computer keys, a vision that bears me

down the umbilicus of dreams toward a dim, persistent, unreasoning rhythm, a

music long promised, a visitation at last given up and unlooked for, ghostly silk

loomed from winter’s cocoon or the opening of one wind-shaken blossom -

Behold the sleepers! When they wake everything,

o everything

shall be transformed.

Trojan Poetry 107: "White-Eyes" by Mary Oliver

White-Eyes

By Mary Oliver

In winter 

    all the singing is in 

         the tops of the trees 

             where the wind-bird 

with its white eyes 

    shoves and pushes 

         among the branches. 

             Like any of us 

he wants to go to sleep, 

    but he's restless— 

         he has an idea, 

             and slowly it unfolds 

from under his beating wings 

    as long as he stays awake. 

         But his big, round music, after all, 

             is too breathy to last. 

So, it's over. 

    In the pine-crown 

         he makes his nest, 

             he's done all he can. 

I don't know the name of this bird, 

    I only imagine his glittering beak 

         tucked in a white wing 

             while the clouds— 

which he has summoned 

    from the north— 

         which he has taught 

             to be mild, and silent— 

thicken, and begin to fall 

    into the world below 

         like stars, or the feathers 

               of some unimaginable bird 

that loves us, 

    that is asleep now, and silent— 

         that has turned itself 

             into snow.

Source: Poetry (Poetry Foundation, 2002)

Trojan Poetry 106: "Costumes Exchanging Glances" by Mary Jo Bang

Costumes Exchanging Glances

By Mary Jo Bang

                      The rhinestone lights blink off and on.

Pretend stars.

I'm sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said

of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave.

A science of motion toward some flat surface,

some heat, some cold. Some light

can leave some after-image but it doesn't last.

Isn't that what they say? That and that

historical events exchange glances with nothingness.

Mary Jo Bang, "Costumes Exchanging Glances" from The Last Two Seconds. Copyright © 2015 by Mary Jo Bang.

Trojan Poetry 105: "When Giving Is All We Have" by Alberto Ríos

When Giving Is All We Have

by Alberto Rios

                                             One river gives

                                             Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.

We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.

We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,

We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you

What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

Trojan Poetry 104: "In Celebration" by Mark Strand with van Gogh and Egon Schiele

In Celebration

By Mark Strand

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling

the old self become the older self, imagining

only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.

You think that silence is the extra page,

you think that nothing is good or bad, not even

the darkness that fills the house while you sit watching

it happen. You've seen it happen before. Your friends

move past the window, their faces soiled with regret.

You want to wave but cannot raise your hand.

You sit in a chair. You turn to the nightshade spreading

a poisonous net around the house. You taste

the honey of absence. It is the same wherever

you are, the same if the voice rots before

the body, or the body rots before the voice.

You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow

leads to achievement which leads to emptiness.

You know that this is different, that this

is the celebration, the only celebration,

that by giving yourself over to nothing,

you shall be healed. You know there is joy in feeling

your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future,

so you wait, you stare and you wait, and the dust settles

and the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness.

Trojan Poetry 103: "This Inwardness, This Ice" by Christian Wiman and Paul Klee

The Path Into the Blue
by Paul Klee, 1934

This Inwardness, This Ice

By Christian Wiman

This inwardness, this ice,

this wide boreal whiteness

into which he's come

with a crawling sort of care

for the sky's severer blue,

the edge on the air,

trusting his own lightness

and the feel as feeling goes;

this discipline, this glaze,

this cold opacity of days

begins to crack.

No marks, not one scar,

no sign of where they are,

these weaknesses rumoring through,

growing loud if he stays,

louder if he turns back.

Nothing to do but move.

Nowhere to go but on,

to creep, and breathe, and learn

a blue beyond belief,

an air too sharp to pause,

this distance, this burn,

this element of flaws

that winces as it gives.

Nothing to do but live.

Nowhere to be but gone.

Christian Wiman, "This Inward, This Ice" from Hard Night. Copyright © 2005 by Christian Wiman. 

Source: Hard Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)