Masquerade

prologue
i am the one and holy ngumi
ngumi painted bird heard of nations
a last encircling laugh wholly consuming
lord of these dances dance the stations
of the cross this dance is the wind
swallowing sputtering on fire like the bush
spear of the palm of my mind
my frightening howl my hollowing whoosh
impounded as a thief in rankling chains
homesick for Africa sweet forest buffalo
my soul sinks deeper drown me rains
(betrayed of man a goddess incensed her glow)

I
this dance is the dance of life:
whirling speed, twirling dervish
canonized by blood and wind;
and watched from the skies.
sanguine they turn, turn, turn
(the burn of meaning)
and lace themselves with glaciers, march
toward a sacred grove
(pounding of rhythm we fall to the ground)
we are a garden they the gardeners:
cultivate us with your roses, o souls,
and we will whirl to your hundred slaps and blows
until the frost falls from our breath
and garlanded hyenas make a skeletal circle:
invisible like death

II
this dance is the dance of birth:
a scatter of daisies—fermentation
of emerald, the moment of mirrors:
a garish logarithm. birth smells like death
(my birth is the stage, death its ledge)
I stepped on eight knives
to enter this dance; I stepped and I faltered
by each knife, left my foot
and stepped into the world,
a mountain of flesh
(and for my audience the sky)
and I sang, and serpents;
my mother dreamed a dragon fire
and my father was drained of semen;
his legs a jumble, bereft of breath,
tasting umbilicus but marked for death

III
this dance is the dance of knowing:
a knowing like a skeletal crutch: horrible
but ultimate, a shock of paradigm, a blow
of distate at living’s back: but wonderful
to see! to chant! to glow! to wonder no more: to know!
that power usurps its pain. it makes living strange:
thought ever barbs, it pierces consciousness and burns,
recasting in its image the autumn leaf-change
and the winter haunt of morality (white urns)
it is a lion: it roars and snarls, gnashing teeth
and glorious mane, magnificent to behold:
knowing is having truth, and ultimate belief,
its dance a wobbling line, its chanting loud and bold

IV
this dance is the dance of repression:
flames from pianos, played by stretching hands:
a frost-gray wolf
who covers the moon with the moon
and coughs into lungs (frost-gray)
motion is written. icicles break at your throat.
you cacophonize, a frenetic trance
of seizure, a drum of pelicans
(beating broad wings)
over shaking ancestral leaves
(they fear to tremble)
wine-dark the seas
that drown you in frenetic dance
(a seizure)
a jolt, a convulsion, a bonfire
of vain circling rain
(thunder brimming from the clouds)
a charlatan your soul,
a laughing pelican with broad beating wings
(he rests in dim ancestral leaves)
they fear to tremble but don’t know why,
their god made them to breathe and then die

V
this dance is the dance of death:
sunset: a broad beat of wings.
the heart is long with night,
sovereign, a cloud brimming thunder.
once cherried, once a rapture,
now denoued to lightness in a soft burial cloud
(a waltz of tulips)
poseys with chafing petals,
around you in a confiding of blessings:
despair is meaningless,
solitude weariness,
this waltz an answer from the watcher:
death who adjudicates knows your hands, your eyes;
his to stand with arms out-raised. yours to die.

Soneto para la mujer más hermosa

hers is not to be called beautiful, but
to dig in medical books for mystic
knowledge, ancient Hippocratic secrets.
hers is not a vampire but singing blood;
hers a canticle of knowing, cryptic
with obtaining and rebuking regrets
for their hand-wringing or their rash of flesh.
hers a taut oath to a paralyzed god
of self-denying, a hooded skull-like wretch
who wraithes her with pierced hands, an iron rod,
and a manic word: sprechstimme of scripture.
hers is floundering, patient smiling walks
every day, every day; censure
of routine: love eats her like waves at rocks.
Love eats me like a vampire, blood for her
and I know distal alabaster chimes,
her eyes, her eyes, a routine of furor;
I know her rage for me. I know my crimes.
her is mine to protect from blasphemy.
hers a soak in mirrors by painted tears:
I remove my façade of infamy
and rock her, rock her, that hells are her fears:
my hell, the burn of sins unforgiven;
and hers, the flame of lone years in heaven.

Ode for Capitalism

so sit nights, you stinking hobgoblin,
bury your treasure seven miles deep
and laugh, but know days come when you, maudlin,
stand at tombs on Easter and weep,
hunger like wolves fenced from sheep.
you dismember form and damn the saved,
coughing their bones: you scrounge all for dirt,
and bite to make bleed, and laugh, and dig graves;
America averts her gaze.
the vile bodies fester for days.
you who alone give orders, a crown
whispering to a blind king, and you
who while a bulldozer claim sacred ground
to stand, arrest motion. your flu
inflects darker minds, unmoved by truth,
rabid and starving for their riches.
they burn their scruples to join you,
red like power, and crucify false witches;
they torture and they play bastard chess.
America watches. Her eye twitches.

Salome

for Gustave Moreau

Motion is calligraphy, thought barbed wire.
Salome's dance is a hissing razor.
John coughs and chokes. Salome breathes like fire.
Her gruesome prize King Herod's awful chore.
Motion is catastrophe, thought thick salve.
Her skin burns with guilt like pus-filled blisters.
Women hold their babies, cows their white calves.
Light echoes seething on marble. It glisters.
It envelops her. For this she was born:
to stick in his throat, a sentence of mud.
Her motion calligraphy, pages torn.
Hissing viper: when she strikes it draws blood.
The brief pause of guilt. King Herod guffaws.
Salome twirls. Her thoughts are eagle's claws.