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Heritage Quest

There are no Names for Red

(From a sequence of 30 poems titled of the same title written in meditation and response to 30 paintings by
African-American novelist and painter Percival Everett).

I

The way desire is a body eroding
into a pile of salt marked by a crown of birds:
and black. This fall is not rain, grain too subtle
for that dissolution. A constellation wrapped
in a stitch spreading like sand charting
thread across time a tender weave
and hope. This is resurrection.

II

And the sky is red
And the moon
And light is this rain.
This is all the terror we can bear:
the moment between flame
and where shadow begins
but only so much as can be cupped
in a child’s palm
and yet to say: the loved one
has slipped to ghost.

III

What attempts survival here has no words
but hunger. A white backcloth that devours
the blackening. Then red cut in lines thick
as paste and obscuring the once figurative.
This desire wears cerements of yellow and sun.
And at the edge of this world, a box of wood
and canvas; light and light and light.

VI

What passes for night here has more to do with the place
where the body is flayed open to sorrow and wonder.
The boy on the bridge drops a feather into a lost river.
A rusting lawn dreams of grass rude and fescue.
A match held down to tobacco still burns with an upward flame.
There is no truth here.
Dutifully the mist comes down the mountain. What else can I tell you?

XI

That woman in a New York café cannot escape what it means
to sound like a Boer. If I were a better man, I would have compassion.
The thing is this: the dead won’t stay buried. Emily said, about the woman
on the bus. She said are you going to the other side?
How easy it is for light reflecting off a polished wood floor to bend into metaphor.
Fire, water and mud. What a curious way to make a body.
Gravity wasn’t the apple to Newton’s head and yet he claims discovery.
But the moment you point to the black dog shivering against the red door
in the relentless rain, you lose it.

XVI

Also in other non-intended ways but touching. Canvas
heavy with salt after salt and salt and water,
the brine a knowledge and this sail unannealed like skin
and my grandmother dying, dying in the shower and water
all around her. This is not intended and yet the distance between
almost perfect and complete chaos is a hair’s breath.
Loose strands unravel and follow an idea.
In Berlin there are brass caps, square and green with time,
set into the paving stones that trip you.
You look down and see the names of those taken to the camps.
Stubbing stones they call them. Stolpersteine. And nobody knows
exactly who put them there. Turkish women in black
descend on us like a gaggle of crows. Yes, I said gaggle.
And what is gained? And what is lost?
What begs silence here is beyond even that