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.