At Wolf River my father is singing.
The sun is shining and there’s a cooler
of Pabst in the shade. He is singing
and playing the guitar—the sad songs
I hide from each time: a man pining
for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead
on a slab at Saint James. I’m too young to know
this is foreshadowing. To get away from
the blues I don’t understand, I wade in water
shallow enough to cross. On the bank
at the other side, I look back at him as if
across the years: he’s smaller, his voice
lost in the distance between us.
3.
On the Gulf and Ship Island Line
my father and I walk the rails south
toward town. More than twenty years
gone, he’s come back to see this place,
recollect what he’s lost. What he recalls
of my childhood is here. We find it
in the brambles of blackberry, the coins
flattened on the tracks. We can’t help it—
already, we’re leaning too hard
toward metaphor: my father searching
for the railroad switch. It was here, right
here, he says, turning this way and that—
the rails vibrating now, a train coming.
Torna Atrás
After De Albina y Español, Nace Torna Atrás (From Albino and Spaniard, a Return-Backwards Is Born), anonymous, c. 1785–1790
The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so
we see him at his work: painting a portrait of his wife—
their dark child watching nearby, a servant grinding colors
in the corner. The woman poses just beyond his canvas
and cannot see her likeness, her less than mirror image
coming to life beneath his hand. He has rendered her
homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene, dressed
in late-century fashion, a chiqueador—mark of beauty
in the shape of a crescent moon—affixed to her temple.
If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has yet to make her
beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,
the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress
with lace and trim, it is only one way to see it. You might see,
instead, that the artist—perhaps to show his own skill—
has made the father a dilettante, incapable of capturing
his wife’s beauty. Or, that he cannot see it: his mind’s eye
reducing her to what he’s made as if to reveal the illusion
immanent in her flesh. If you consider the century’s mythology
of the body—that a dark spot marked the genitals of anyone
with African blood—you might see how the black moon
on her white face recalls it: the roseta she passes to her child
marking him torna atrás. If I tell you such terms were born
in the Enlightenment’s hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire
is myopia, you might see the father’s vision as desire embodied
in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself
as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift
ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand
my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is
that a man could love—and so diminish what he loves.
Bird in the House
A gift, you said, when we found it.
And because my mother was dead,
I thought the cat had left it for me. The bird
was black as omen, like a single crow
meaning sorrow. It was the year
you’d remarried, summer—
the fields high and the pond reflecting
everything: the willow, the small dock,
the crow overhead that—doubled—
should have been an omen for joy.
Forgive me, Father, that I brought to that house
my grief. You will not recall telling me
you could not understand my loss, not until
your own mother died. Each night I’d wake
from a dream, my heart battering my rib cage—
a trapped, wild bird. I did not know then
the cat had brought in a second grief: what was it
but animal knowledge? Forgive me
you did, that I watched you bury the bird
in the backyard—your back to me; I saw you
flatten the mound, erasing it into the dirt.
Artifact
As long as I can remember you kept the rifle—
your grandfather’s, an antique you called it—
in your study, propped against the tall shelves
that held your many books. Upright,
beside those hard-worn spines, it was another
backbone of your past, a remnant I studied
as if it might unlock—like the skeleton key
its long body resembled—some door I had yet
to find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bullet
as you described: spiraling through the bore
and spinning straight for its target. It did not hit me
then: the rifle I’d inherit showing me
how one life is bound to another, that hardship
endures. For years I admired its slender profile,
until—late one night, somber with drink—you told me
it still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,
and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic
sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.
Fouled
From the next room I hear my father’s voice,
a groan at first, a sound so sad I think he must be
reliving a catalog of things lost: all the dead
come back to stand ringside, the glorious body
of his youth—a light heavyweight, fight-ready
and glistening—that beauty I see now in pictures.
Looking into the room, I half imagine I’ll find him
shadowboxing the dark, arms and legs twitching
as a dog runs in sleep. Tonight, I’ve had to help him
into bed—stumbling up the stairs, his arm a weight
on my shoulders so heavy it nearly brought us down.
Now his distress cracks open the night; he is calling
my name. I could wake him, tell him it’s only a dream,
that I am here. Here is the threshold I do not cross:
a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo,
the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.
Rotation
Like the moon that night, my father—
a distant body, white and luminous.
How small I was back then,
looking up as if from dark earth.
Distant, his body white and luminous,
my father stood in the doorway.
Looking up as if from dark earth,
I saw him outlined in a scrim of light.
My father stood in the doorway
as if to watch over me as I dreamed.
When I saw him outlined—a scrim of light—
he was already waning, turning to go.
Once, he watched over me as I dreamed.
How small I was. Back then,
he was already turning to go, waning
like the moon that night—my father.
IV
Thrall
Juan de Pareja, 1670
He was not my father
though he might have been
I came to him
the mulatto son
of a slave woman
just that
as if it took
only my mother
to make me
a mulatto
meaning
any white man
could be my father
In his shop bound
to the muller
I ground his colors
my hands dusted black
with fired bone stained
blue and flecked
with glass my nails
edged vermilion as if
my fingertips bled
In this way just as
I’d turned the pages
of his books
I meant to touch
everything he did
With Velázquez in Rome
a divination
At market I lingered to touch
the bright hulls of lemons
closed my eyes until
the scent was oil
and thinner yellow ocher
in my head
And once
the sudden taste of iron
a glimpse of red
like a wound opening
the robes of the pope
at portrait
that bright shade of blood
before it darkens
purpling nearly to black
Because he said
painting was not
labor was
the province of free men
I could only
watch Such beauty
in the work of his hands
his quick strokes
a divine language I learned
over his shoulder
my own hands
tracing the air
in his wake Forbidden
to answer in paint
I kept my canvases secret
hidden until
Velázquez decreed
unto me
myself Free
I was apprentice he
my master still
How intently at times
could he fix his keen eye
upon me
though only once
did he fix me in paint
my color a study
my eyes wide
as I faced him
a lace collar at my shoulders
as though I’d been born
noble
the yoke of my birth
gone from my neck
In his hand a long brush
to keep him far
from the canvas
far from it as I was
the distance between us
doubled that
he could observe me
twice stand closer
to what he made
For years I looked to it
as one looks into a mirror
And so
in The Calling of Saint Matthew
I painted my own
likeness a freeman
in the House of Customs
waiting to pay
my duty In my hand
an answer a slip of paper
my signature on it
Juan de Pareja 1661
Velázquez one year gone
Behind me
upright on a shelf
a forged platter luminous
as an aureole
just beyond my head
my face turned
to look out from the scene
a self-portrait
To make it
I looked at how
my master saw me then
I narrowed my eyes
Now
at the bright edge
of sleep mother
She comes back to me
as sound
her voice
in the echo of birdcall
a single syllable
again
and again my name
Juan Juan Juan
or a bit of song that
waking
I cannot grasp
Calling
Mexico, 1969
Why not make a fiction
of the mind’s fictions? I want to say
it begins like this: the trip
a pilgrimage, my mother
kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin,
enthralled—light streaming in
a window, the sun
at her back, holy water
in a bowl she must have touched.
What’s left is palimpsest—one memory
bleeding into another, overwriting it.
How else to explain
what remains? The sound
of water in a basin I know is white,
the sun behind her, light streaming in,
her face—
as if she were already dead—blurred
as it will become.
I want to imagine her before
the altar, rising to meet us, my father
lifting me
toward her outstretched arms.
What else to make
of the mind’s slick confabulations?
What comes back
is the sun’s dazzle on a pool’s surface,
light filtered through water
closing over my head, my mother—her body
between me and the high sun, a corona of light
around her face. Why not call it
a vision? What I know is this:
I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;
someone pulled me through
the water’s bright ceiling
and I rose, initiate,
from one life into another.
Enlightenment
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