The Geez
POEMS
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
CONTENTS
Game
Of Language
Offside
Seeing Eyes
Frankenstein
Variables
A Gimbal of Blackness
Hangman
Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow
Of Serendipity
Trumpet
One Night We Hold
Eros
Bottle
break/able
Contiguity
Travelling Solo
Blowing Smoke
How I Know
Of Sides
Locking Doors
Year AD87: BM14
A Concise Geography of Heartbreak
Underbelly
lenguaje
Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ
Dark Spirits
Eaux
Oscura y sus obras
Caress
yorkshire bath displays
The Furnace
Inheritance
11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa
Tree of the Invisible Man
Defences
sub.marine.blues
Zest
Our Love is Here to Stay
Crossroad vs Blues
Interpretation
#Labour
Moonwalk
To Be In Love
Casablanca
Vogue
Game
Of Language
It might have been one night celebrating
a mother’s birthday in a Paris hotel room,
or some breathless minutes at the in-laws’
whispering like experimenting teenagers – still,
out of the fifty-thousand scent memory we have
there is now the smell of a baby girl, one born
in a war zone less equipped than Syria
but, for a child at the front lines, perhaps
just as damaging as time unravels. You are
her father; she is a cheeky, fragile joy,
but, because you love her, you must leave.
A coin tosses endlessly in your head; sleepless
nights have your heart torn and off-kilter.
You wrestle your selfish urges, find strength
to walk away. You know it is right,
but you have never known pain like this
and how can a suckling baby understand why
a shadow inhabits the space that was her
father? Except, your first time alone with her,
after she has left her mother’s arms, she holds
you doesn’t.let.go for the longest time.
Offside
Because I know about green mangoes
more than I know about any woman
I teach my sister about boys, how to
think like one, play one step ahead.
I tell her not to step back, any time
they lunge forward, but to side-step,
stay focused, show no fear; I show her
the same thing works in football, before
the age of positions, they rush like dogs;
that’s when you pass and move, hold on
for a minute, then accelerate. Speed
combined with timing, like a good joke,
and you have beaten the offside trap.
I teach her to punch too, and for good
measure, where. By sixteen maths is play
for her, she has boys rapt for her punch
a line of their own in. She foils them
all. Years later when she has settled,
done her 38 weeks, I get the call. I am told
It’s a boy. It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy!
Seeing Eyes
Pretending I can’t find my bi yoo bibioo
simply because she has covered her eyes
gives her as much joy as the silly faces
I sometimes pull. Out of the 43 facial muscles
I should have, I stretch, contract, contort,
conjure shapes that get the desired reaction.
But when she hides she is in control – even
ridicules me for not seeing her: I’m right
here, Daddy, she screams, then runs to hug me.
Already the time is coming when the trick will be
too old. I know so well how soon our pleasures go.
I recall hiding from my grandma. Her dark eyes
imprisoned behind cataracts, I was always stunned
how easily she found me. She didn’t even move;
she just pointed, and my reaction was always – How?
Some quality of those hours with her is how I see God:
something of her certainty that I had my late father’s
physiognomy just from the sound of my voice; how
she hugged this inherited body, this borrowed
shape and hue, close to her, cradled its shifting
face, seeing and loving a grandchild with no eyes.
Frankenstein
You know that Kareem Abdul Jabbar hook
shot, right? Drexler’s glide, Pippen knocking
the ball away from someone’s control to send it
up to Air... Something you could always count on
when things got rough. That was Victor for us;
the opponent’s worst enemy. He came on
when games got tight, when pushing, shoving
and trash talk started to creep into the game
plan. We knew the secret; he only played
well when angry. They’d make their own monster.
The more they pushed, the sweeter the song
of his bounce; the harder they shoved, the surer
his aim became, his balance impeccable as he let
his shooting-hand hang limp after each projectile
took flight. He had something we all didn’t, he knew
gravity was a kind of violence too; you had to ride it.
They just reminded him of his father; a short man
who had shredded his mother with his sharp tongue,
slapped his son until the day his six-foot-six seed snapped,
grabbed him by the neck the same way he plucked
a rebound out of the air. We thought Victor was freak
material – a unique beast – until we saw his sister play.
She was good all the time – every quarter of the clock
face – moved like a whispered insult, precise as a second
hand, her fury constant as the force that held us down.
Variables
(a gambil)
Asked about heartbreak, X might drop
a matchstick and raise a finger to point
at a delivery van rolling heavily past
a home. Let’s say it’s blue as a flame’s heart
and it stops in front of a brick building
where, on the third floor, a boy (Y) is framed
in his window perch by the yellow lamp
light beyond him. Y has headphones like planets
over his ears and is bent over a sheet
of paper, shading blackness into faces.
The window next to his is an animation;
two adult figures gesturing, their mouths black holes.
Because of the galaxy he carries, the window
boy – Y – will not hear his parents’ battle, but
high above the van’s blue, a beat is breaking.
X has not said a word, weary gaze focussed
outside. The match X dropped will grow
into a fire X won’t notice but for its heat,
won’t recognise – for who wou
ld call a window
a mirror? Has no one ever told you heartbreak
is always elsewhere? What is Y in the world of Xs?
A Gimbal of Blackness
for Pops
Night cannot grasp the swift flight
of wind, but blackens every tree
the air moves, paints them darker, pushes
them against the light, the shapeless
light that gives them shape to shift
before my eyes. I am often in the embrace
of night; I am myself a dark thing –
the kind that was once called boy when man
– that was born of a woman descended from hills
and a man delivered from boyhood by the sea,
a man now lifeless though he gave me life.
I am often in the embrace of dark thoughts,
reflecting the light of the moon. I recall
a can of Guinness left in a London fridge –
one my father bought but didn’t get to drink,
kept for me by a well-meaning aunt. And how
hard my throat shrank with every sip, how sharp
that smooth black liquid felt inside me, how hard
these nights that blacken me, broken with grief
for a man I loved who can no longer grieve.
Hangman
Out of the benign madness of our homes, we are
players of a different ilk, dreamers with no respect
for height, for flight, for the choke-hold of night.
Round midnight, and the faded lip of the rim still
gleams from the desperate reach of a weak street lamp,
like a vaselined smile beckoning in the corner of a club.
We shoot our shots and indulge in wordplay, lines
drafted onto paper each time a letter is called out –
after the basketball, nerveless despite its perpetual goosebumps,
kisses the hoop and slides in. Our Hangman is different.
We have sheaves of thick blank paper and pencils in three grades.
We’re all artists: when we guess a wrong letter we draw curves
instead of lines and, because we like to fly, birds are
our thing. We call our game Wingman. As we play, feathers
emerge carrying streamlined bodies, the arcs of our three-pointers
truer with each attempt. We quote Rakim lines as the purest
form of trash talk, holding both pencil and ball like a grudge
although we’re drawing the same bird: whether we end up
with an eagle or a crow, we know there is no noose,
no pain, just the net and our dreams – nobody dies
even if one soars.
Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow
Wested girl, your city has taught you to hate
the kind of men you fall for, Pictures of them
flash on local news cycles every night
when newsreaders’ lips are twisted by crime
into shapes never full glass but coloured stem.
Pale news tongues never mention the melting of Shea
butter in dark male hands, fingers in grandmothers’ hair,
the posters of Paddington Bear that they haven’t
removed from their walls since the age of seven,
how they hum love songs off-key, the nails they bite
when nervous. They’ve debated the shots of Sembene
Ousmane & Kurosawa, read the words of Giovanni & Auden,
played around with fistfuls of chopped coriander
to render simple meals great, but the papers
won’t mention those things: those travel headlines you get
that label boys as men and men as boys and
boys as scourges, mark them out as threats
by sly leans of language. You know that’s truth bent,
you’ve seen these men’s tears, but come crunch time
you still see what you’ve been taught, what you desire:
their bodies – those vessels with shades of darker
for skin – with muscle, with muscle, with muscle within;
with muscle, with muscle, with muscle and sin...
and you forget the epicardium, its sublayers,
the spaces it cradles within, its pockets of fear.
Of Serendipity
Cybernetic serendipity was a phrase invented
for me by my father – an easy source
of laughs when a child can’t shape his
soft Cs or Rs properly, but a priceless gift
for his vocabulary. Later, he would explain
gyroscopes as objects with a steady core,
their orientation maintained with the help
of outer gimbals that spin. I never asked
what happens if gimbals break, if
a heart’s constant tread is unbalanced
by a break in the body that holds it;
what happens when serendipity dictates
that cancer is a hammer that knocks
gimbals out of shape? What I know
is: I was out delivering newspapers;
the weather was icy as death; I felt
my father depart at the traffic light;
I raised my handlebars and tried
to force my way through the red to my own
demise; horns blared like a final chorus
but my unbroken gyroscope stayed true.
Trumpet
The first time you blow
a tight-lipped buzz into the funnel
of a silvered mouthpiece, you understand
Charles’s Law – the one on held pressure
not Mingus’s well-thumbed message
of exact timing – that tells us all we need
to know about temperature and what volume
it moves. If it’s hot, it’s straight up
physics: volume is maximal. You knew,
but now you really know the fire
it takes to set that horn alight,
spark music along its burnished length,
the molten brass opening out
to spew
a resonant shaft
of burnished, burning air.
One Night We Hold
for Ms Bones
One night we hold and the lights go
out. Everything in the world turns peripheral
vision. We lose ourselves in the dark edges
that pattern the wings of some bright butterfly flitting
between your skin and mine. We let go of logic,
history; we believe we are beyond the grasp of gravity
floating as we are in these sensations we kiss
with. Time, family and friends swim
outside the urgency of our hunger. We believe
in the everlasting of love, never stopping
to wonder where we might drop anchor. We abandon
reality’s compass at the border of our lips. All we know
now is the spin of intoxication, a cocktail of sighs pitched
into a cauldron of dancing flames. We carry our own light
birthed, like campfires, from friction;
two bodies moved by hands to the melting point of Sodium.
We are salt separating into its elements, we are Lot’s nameless
wife reclaiming our story. If nobody else looked back
everything is a rumour. We are sweat without words;
how it feels is a held breath. Tomorrow’s story sits in
the depth of our eyes, limpid as lakes reflecting night.
Eros
Bottle
I think of the room, the way
it separated into definite things
in new light. the sparse spread
of furniture; the writing table
a chequerboard of thought, schemes,
the bed no longer neat,
and beside
it, shiny glasses, unused, a bottle empty
of rum, on my tongue the dance of her
sweat and the sugarcane’s trapped burn
stripped
from every limb her body possesses.
A story –
some old pub nugget of Ethiopian women
and their skill at splitting chickens
into twelve parts, with no need for knives,
just a tender feel for the limits of flesh,
the fear it must inspire in stray husbands –
comes to mind
when I imagine her body
that morning: the hunger that tensed my being
how I was afraid to tell her I might be
in love with her,
terrified
of seeding hopes
I could not suckle,
the salt-charged taste of her,
rum
that smoulders still
in the back of my throat.
break/able
Last night we left the blinds half/open, so
the sun would wake us. The train you must catch
more important than our week/long jive
with the natural order of things. This is how it comes
to be that I witness the darkness relaxing its hold
on our bodies, yielding us to form; first shadowed angles,
the berried tip of your left breast quick to sip warmth
from the light. My in/drawn breath is both desire
and awe; how this break/able body of yours can hold all
of mine, bucking right back, demanding more, is a miracle
– as is this slow awakening of my flesh, mimicking sunrise.
Waking you is my temptation, but the smile that plays
on your sleeping face is my vanity a/live; I will not kill
it. Instead I muse on the subtle/ties of love; how, to reach
ecstasy, I must be weak for you, let you guide me
as I guide you, no egos fingering the edges of our frailty.
I remember your eyes holding mine, our laughter manic,
nothing between us, knowing how well we fit, how all
our migrations have led to this moment. We spare no energy
for questions, the kind the world’s eyes throw at us
the same way the morning/light separates us into sable/sand.
Contiguity
Separation is a seven-minute walk
taken together, one train stop alone,
followed by another train and an hour’s flight
– three hours if you count the formalities