At first, there was nothing to do but watch.
For days, before the trucks arrived, before the work
of clean-up, my brother sat on the stoop and watched.
He watched the ambulances speed by, the police cars;
watched for the looters who’d come each day
to siphon gas from the car, take away the generator,
the air conditioner, whatever there was to be had.
He watched his phone for a signal, watched the sky
for signs of a storm, for rain so he could wash.
At the church, handing out diapers and water,
he watched the people line up, watched their faces
as they watched his. And when at last there was work,
he got a job, on the beach, as a watcher.
Behind safety goggles, he watched the sand for bones,
searched for debris that clogged the great machines.
Riding the prow of the cleaners, or walking ahead,
he watched for carcasses—chickens mostly, maybe
some cats or dogs. No one said remains. No one
had to. It was a kind of faith, that watching:
my brother trained his eyes to bear
the sharp erasure of sand and glass, prayed
there’d be nothing more to see.
3. Believer
FOR TAMARA JONES
The house is in need of repair, but is—
for now, she says—still hers. After the storm
she laid hands on what she could reclaim:
the iron table and chairs etched with rust,
the dresser laced with mold. Four years gone,
she’s still rebuilding the shed out back
and sorting through boxes in the kitchen—
a lifetime of bills and receipts, deeds
and warranties, notices spread on the table,
a barrage of red ink: PAST DUE. Now
the house is a museum of everything
she can’t let go: a pile of photographs—
fused and peeling—water stains blurring
the handwritten names of people she can’t recall;
a drawer crowded with funeral programs
and church fans, rubber bands and paper sleeves
for pennies, nickels, and dimes. What stops me
is the stack of tithing envelopes. Reading my face,
she must know I can’t see why—even now—
she tithes, why she keeps giving to the church.
First seek the kingdom of God, she tells me,
and the rest will follow—says it twice
as if to make a talisman of her words.
4. Kin
FOR ROY LEE JEFFERSON
He has the surname that suggests
a contested kinship: Jefferson—
the name, too, of this dead-end street
cut in half by Highway 49. Here,
at the corner where it crosses Alabama,
he’s perched on the stoop, early evening,
at my cousin Tammy’s house, empty
bottles at his feet. When he sees me
opening the gate, walking up smiling,
he reads me first as white woman, then—
he says—half-breed. It’s my hair, he tells me:
No black woman got hair like that,
and my car, a sedan he insists
the cops don’t let black people drive,
not here, not without pulling them over
again and again. He’s still wearing
his work uniform—grass stains and clippings
from the mower he pushed all day—
and his name tag, a badge, still pinned
to his collar. He tells me he’d swap the badge
for one from another boss, switch jobs
if he could get more pay; says
his boss has plenty of money—cheese,
he calls it. Man’s tight with it, he squeak
when he walk. So Roy waits, biding
his time, he says, till the Lord bless me
with something else. When he goes quiet,
I ask him the easy question—one I know
he’s been asked a hundred times—
just to hear him talk: Where were you
during the storm? That’s when he tells me
what he hasn’t this whole time, holding it back
maybe, saving it for the right moment:
I got a baby with your cousin Tammy’s sister—
that makes us kin. You can’t run
from the Lord. I don’t know what he sees
White girl, he says, you gone come
see my baby, come up to the country
where we stay? He’s walking away now,
a tallboy in his hand. I’m trying to say
yes, one day, sure, but he’s nearly gone,
looking back over his shoulder, shaking
his head, laughing now as he says this:
When you waiting on kinfolks,
you be waiting forever.
5. Exegesis
On Saturday, when I come to see
my brother, they call him over loudspeaker
to the tower—a small guardroom
at the entrance to the prison. I sign my name
in the book, write R0470—his number—
and agree to a search. I stand as if
I would make a snow angel in the air,
and the woman guard pats me down
lightly. Waiting for him, I consider
the squat room’s title: how it once meant
prison, and to the religious faithful, heaven.
Here, my brother has no use for these words,
this easy parsing. This time he tells me
he’s changed his name: Jo-ell instead of Joel—
name of the man who took our mother’s life—
his father, an inmate somewhere else.
Thinking only of words, I’d wanted to tell him
the name means prophet. That was before I knew
it had—for him—been a prison, too.
6. Prodigal
I
Once, I was a daughter of this place:
daughter of Gwen, granddaughter
of Leretta, great- of Eugenia McGee.
I was baptized in the church
my great-aunt founded, behind
the drapes my grandmother sewed.
As a child, I dozed in the pews
and woke to chant the Lord’s Prayer—
mouthing the lines I did not learn.
Still a girl, I put down the red flower
and wore a white bloom pinned to my chest—
the mark of loss: a motherless child. All
the elders knew who I was, recalled me
each time I came home and spoke
my ancestors’ names—Sugar, Son Dixon—
a native tongue. What is home but a cradle
of the past? Too long gone, I’ve found
my key in the lock of the old house
will not turn—a narrative of rust;
and everywhere the lacunae of vacant lots,
For Sale signs, a notice reading Condemned.
II
I wanted to say I have come home
to bear witness, to read the sign
emblazoned on the church marquee—
Believe the report of the Lord—
and trust that this is noble work, that
which must be done. I wanted to say I see,
not I watch. I wanted my seeing to be
a sanctuary, but what I saw was this:
in my rearview mirror, the marquee’s
other side—Face the things that confront you.
My first day back, a pilgrim, I traveled
the old neighborhood, windows up,
steering the car down streets I hadn’t seen
in years. It was Sunday. At the rebuil
t church
across from my grandmother’s house,
I stepped into the vestibule and found
not a solid wall as years before, but
a new wall, glass through which I could see
the sanctuary. And so, I did not go in;
I stood there, my face against the glass,
watching. I could barely hear the organ,
the hymn they sang, but when the congregation rose,
filing out of the pews, I knew it was the call
to altar. And still, I did not enter. Outside,
as I’d lingered at the car, a man had said,
You got to come in. You can’t miss the word.
I got as far as the vestibule—neither in
nor out. The service went on. I did nothing
but watch, my face against the glass—until
someone turned, looked back: saw me.
7. Benediction
I thought that when I saw my brother
walking through the gates of the prison,
he would look like a man entering
his life. And he did. He carried
a small bag, holding it away from his body
as if he would not touch it, or
that it weighed almost nothing.
The clothes he wore seemed to belong
to someone else, like hand-me-downs
given a child who will one day
grow into them. Behind him, at the fence,
the inmates were waving, someone saying
All right now. And then
my brother was walking toward us,
a few awkward steps, at first, until
he got it—how to hold up the too-big pants
with one hand, and in the other
carry everything else he had.
Liturgy
FOR THE MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST
To the security guard staring at the Gulf
thinking of bodies washed away from the coast, plugging her ears
against the bells and sirens—sound of alarm—the gaming floor
on the Coast;
To Billy Scarpetta, waiting tables on the Coast, staring at the Gulf
thinking of water rising, thinking of New Orleans, thinking of cleansing
the Coast;
To the woman dreaming of returning to the Coast, thinking of water
rising,
her daughter’s grave, my mother’s grave—underwater—on the Coast;
To Miss Mary, somewhere;
To the displaced, living in trailers along the coast, beside the highway,
in vacant lots and open fields; to everyone who stayed on the Coast,
who came back—or cannot—to the Coast;
For those who died on the Coast.
This is a memory of the Coast: to each his own
recollections, her reclamations, their
restorations, the return of the Coast.
This is a time capsule for the Coast: words of the people
—don’t forget us—
the sound of wind, waves, the silence of graves,
the muffled voice of history, bulldozed and buried
under sand poured on the eroding coast,
the concrete slabs of rebuilding the Coast.
This is a love letter to the Gulf Coast, a praise song, a dirge,
invocation and benediction, a requiem for the Gulf Coast.
This cannot rebuild the Coast; it is an indictment, a complaint,
my logos—argument and discourse—with the Coast.
This is my nostos—my pilgrimage to the Coast, my memory,
my reckoning—
native daughter: I am the Gulf Coast.
V
from
Thrall
What is love?
One name for it is knowledge.
—Robert Penn Warren
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
—T. S. Eliot
Illumination
Always there is something more to know
what lingers at the edge of thought
awaiting illumination as in
this secondhand book full
of annotations daring the margins in pencil
a light stroke as if
the writer of these small replies
meant not to leave them forever
meant to erase
evidence of this private interaction
Here a passage underlined there
a single star on the page
as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy
where only the brightest appears
a tiny spark I follow
its coded message try to read in it
the direction of the solitary mind
that thought to pencil in
a jagged arrow It
is a bolt of lightning
where it strikes
I read the line over and over
as if I might discern
the little fires set
the flames of an idea licking the page
how knowledge burns Beyond
the exclamation point
its thin agreement angle of surprise
there are questions the word why
So much is left
untold Between
the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl
between what is said and not
white space framing the story
the way the past unwritten
eludes us So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting
Knowledge
AFTER A CHALK DRAWING BY
J. H. HASSELHORST, 1864
Whoever she was, she comes to us like this:
lips parted, long hair spilling from the table
like water from a pitcher, nipples drawn out
for inspection. Perhaps to foreshadow
the object she’ll become: a skeleton on a pedestal,
a row of skulls on a shelf. To make a study
of the ideal female body, four men gather around her.
She is young and beautiful and drowned—
a Venus de’ Medici, risen from the sea, sleeping.
As if we could mistake this work for sacrilege,
the artist entombs her body in a pyramid
of light, a temple of science over which
the anatomist presides. In the service of beauty—
to know it—he lifts a flap of skin
beneath her breast as one might draw back a sheet.
We will not see his step-by-step parsing,
a translation: Mary or Katherine or Elizabeth
to corpus, areola, vulva. In his hands
instruments of the empirical—scalpel, pincers—
cold as the room must be cold: all the men
in coats, trimmed in velvet or fur—soft as the down
of her pubis. Now one man is smoking, another
tilts his head to get a better look. Yet another,
at the head of the table, peers down as if
enthralled, his fist on a stack of books.
In the drawing this is only the first cut,
a delicate wounding; and yet how easily
the anatomist’s blade opens a place in me,
like a curtain drawn upon a room in which
each learned man is my father
and I hear, again, his words—I study
my crossbreed child—misnomer
and taxonomy, the language of zoology. Here,
he is all of them: the preoccupied man—
an artist, collector of experience; the skeptic angling
his head, his tho
ughts tilting toward
what I cannot know; the marshaller of knowledge,
knuckling down a stack of books; even
the dissector—his scalpel in hand like a pen
poised above me, aimed straight for my heart.
Miracle of the Black Leg
PICTORIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PHYSICIAN-SAINTS COSMAS AND DAMIAN AND THE MYTH OF THE MIRACLE TRANSPLANT—BLACK DONOR, WHITE RECIPIENT—DATE BACK TO THE MID-FOURTEENTH CENTURY, APPEARING MUCH LATER THAN WRITTEN VERSIONS OF THE STORY.
1
Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always
one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,
placed in another man’s grave: the white leg
buried beside the corpse or attached as if
it were always there. If not for the dark appendage
you might miss the story beneath this story—
what remains each time the myth changes: how,
in one version, the doctors harvest the leg
from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church
of a martyr, or—in another—desecrate a body
fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:
There was buried just today an Ethiopian.
Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover
the truth, we dig, say unearth.
2
Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the body’s lacuna,
the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,
a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking