darker at night – sea or sky? A body knows
which dark swallows it whole, but will stay
silent. There is a word for that. I go to bed thinking
there is so much space in the world.
Where are the bony legs to kick me, the questions
that punctuate the black like stars? How long
to fill a canvas with textures of night
without hints of blue, streaks of yellow,
the ballast of its memory of sunset’s bruise?
iv
One day I’m in a café writing a poem
about arachnids, sketching eight legs
because words are slow to come.
A kid comes over to ask what I’m doing,
his skin dark as my daughter’s, his dimple
like my son’s. I’m trying to fill the space,
I say, looking at my page, the black paint of brooding.
v
If the scene were painted again, the jib
sail rippling gently with air, the vessel silhouetted,
the sun red as a crying eye and sinking,
the water’s gleam a smooth carapace... Even
with what it knows now, with the pain to come,
the nights vast as three empty beds, my flesh
would still enter the damp, be swallowed
by its mood until the body, again, moves.
Caress
i
If I speak often of gardening and day’s
slow rise behind the creep of morning sun,
it is because somewhere along my thigh lies
the memory of a tomato plant’s jagged leaf
nibbling at my skin at dawn, your hand steady
at my shoulder, your voice gentle in my ear,
pointing out tiny buds that will turn to flower
then fruit. I hold the faded watering can,
its silver sharp against my grip, dark as yours
as we wade between beds of onion and kale,
lettuce both green and red, aubergines that stand
high as my chest – and all the while time unfurls;
birds bicker in the guava tree behind us, doors
crack open, the light spreads, its lustre caressing
your tight curls as you pull a radish clean out
of the soil, shake it and bite through its red
skin to the crunch of its white flesh, passing
one half to me. We speak nothing, Okomfo,
of origins, but I know you planted all these seeds
and taught me the tender and the harsh, the art
of nurturing them. And this is all I needed
to know of love – ever: a morning before sun,
the beauty of bud, flower and fruit, a father’s voice
with birdsong, the tart white secrets in a radish’s heart.
* Okomfo – a healer or diviner, a role usually inherited
ii
Between his first word and his first love, a boy
goes to Grecian lengths to undermine his mother.
His chores undone, he creeps beyond the horizon
of her view, past milk bush and fallen, rotting petals
from bougainvillea, into the haze of dust raised
by a fury of youths playing football, waits his turn
while idle tongues run loose with tips on how to love
a woman, how to dribble from one foot to the other,
scoop the ball up with a touch light as a feather
and strike – all this before he is first called to play.
He drops a word he retains from his escapades
on bare fields
by grass-choked open drains
in patches of fruit- and flower-flecked green
of the kind cities hide like armpit hair
in the air when his mother calls
and the hand she means to place on his unkempt head,
naturally, bears no tenderness.
He scrambles
to shelter by the mongrel that will soon be struck
by lightning, the one whose tongue she despises, waits
for her rage to cool. Thus begins the tutelage
of a man, salvaged from masculinity.
And now he remembers: the strength of her shoulders;
her firm ripostes when because of her short-cropped hair
men dared call her small girl, whistle across the road;
caress of her hand on his neck as she reproved
a teacher for caning him for his forthrightness;
her anklet of coloured glass beads that never broke.
iii
It is easy to be misled when your head lies
in the lap of a lover who promises all
the things you want your life to be filled with, without
so much as a skipped heartbeat. You will learn later
that a cricket’s vow is not the same as an elephant’s, that soft
caresses at the pressure point where the ear’s flesh
meets the skin behind your high cheekbones can shapeshift
into something deadly on a whim – but for now,
You will live in the sun like your grandfather did,
your children will know the thud of avocados
and mangoes falling unbidden from trees at dawn,
they will speak with your tongue, they will know both your songs.
It is easy to forget in those treacle-sweet
moments, the inflection in your name that signals
you have ancestors still owed for their hard labour
in the split rock and damp of the Americas,
how you can’t be beholden to the mediocre
for your very intestines are echo chambers
of dreams swallowed under an umbrella of whips.
In the cavern of a kiss, how easily things slide
to the back of the mind – gone, your father’s lessons
on how to fondle fruit, to tease the tender skin
with fingers to fathom the ephemeral line
between ripe and rotten, so you are lost, tumbling
in a vortex of broken promises, guilt trips
and misused savings. This is what becomes of your heart
just before it breaks and you begin to claw back
yourself:
your blood is hybrid; your tongue is mongrel,
you carry songs of refuge – refugee mysteries
in the loom of Maroon shanties that shift language;
your father has been taken, his own father gone,
father upon father, across borders echo
and the sea waves back; your skin is weather beaten
and it absorbs sun, hatred, fire and shea butter –
it doesn’t crack. Summertime and you’re still living;
pick up your pieces by the only light that still
glows – the fading flower of your mother’s smile.
iv
My daughter dives, clean as a lemongrass blade
cut into water and something in her, some sheen
of worry is extinguished as her long arms brush
what was still into acceleration. She comes
alive, her head bobbing in and out between breaths.
My mother’s shoulders unfurl in her butterfly
strokes, my father’s limbs contract every time she turns.
She is calm – luminous in a way I am not
when I swim; I find my release in word and song
instead, knowing sometimes the precise tune I crave
and what souvenirs it carries. Entire affairs
live with me in this way, in gaps between horn solos,
the catch in Ella’s voice before Satchmo’s
refrain
. :
One day my daughter will remember,
as I did when she was born, a long-buried song
that emerges in snippets, sw
addled in memory
if you ask me
I could write a book...
nkɛ bo baa ya
nkɛ bo baa ya da daa...
then a melody too
she has forgotten the words for, but flowers still
beneath her lips.
A baby cries, its mouth
a dark, dried fruit, and from somewhere
your entire inheritance of comfort comes
tumbling forth: heartbeat, caress, the first
words that stilled the waters
when you entered the world:
kaa fo.
v
Sometimes a man wakes with Spanish phrases
in his head, with no clear reason beyond a few
hours spent in Madrid, Lima and Buenos Aires.
There is no hand on his chest, no man or woman
calling from another room to ask what he will have
with his coffee, no skin-borne memory of caresses
just
mala hierba, which is a snippet of something
overheard and hablemos de la sensualidad
which he can only imagine is the fruit of a history
of building languages from scraps gathered
in the crowds and markets of Accra, Kumasi,
Cape Coast and Manila: Twi, Ewe, Tagalog, Fantsi.
There might be yet more in the bud
of his heritage: with a great-gran from Fernando Po
and others retrieved to the mother continent
from Guadeloupe, Nova Scotia, Jamaica...
who can ever tell what words he will scream
should he wake and find his head
replaced with flowers, his eyes stamens,
his cheeks a mesh of petals, pollen scattering
every time he speaks.
vi
You learn a thing from one lover, use it on another
and he can tell, like she can tell, some frisson
has shifted, some odd flavour lingers
in the fruit of your release.
The question will be asked
later, when seasons have passed and sunflowers gone
to seed, why you lied about it, why you tried
to juggle with the face of a clown,
creep with an elephant’s step.
Was there no father to whisper to you
at dawn which seed belonged to which plant,
which plant to which seed? No mother
to tutor your mouth to speak its desires
kindly, to tell you your heart does not belong
to the hand that caresses your breast?
By then, no answer will return
the body’s unquestioning surrender
or the harvests of swaying sorghum,
yam (its mounds so difficult to master),
cocoa and the wild hibiscus so trendy now
in West African bars. But know this:
you will always be loved. You will find
your heart does not need the flint
of broken promises to blossom into flame.
vii
One child I planted tomatoes with
because for a time there was a patch
of gardening space and sun; another
spoke beautifully with my tongue,
his eyes set in his grandfather’s face;
a third held me by the mouth
kissed me, caressed my cheek
and said Daddy, making my heart
thud at dawn each time I remember.
There are songs I have sung to all
my children, words I stole from tunes
shaped in the mouth of my mother.
Thus the body is echo chamber
and memory; all its parts triggers,
every bruise history, melody.
I carry all my dreams; not as I imagined,
but the heft holds – every flower has
fallen to yield some peculiar fruit.
viii
Absence is silence he has learned
to endure, but sometimes it breaks
his faith in his own existence, makes him
rephrase questions: if a tree falls in a forest
and you don’t hear it do you exist? Maybe
this is why he hums against the wood
of his own headboard, why it is no surprise
that Amazing Grace is the song
an agnostic chooses
to learn
to play
on his
new
trumpet.
Because it has history that will see him
past the clumsy blasts of air
he tries to tame into something
more than a noise, something
recognisable, something
he has heard his mother sing before
with notes his father played – words alive
in the hymn book that survived
his grandmother; a chain that holds them
all, a link that keeps everyone present
in his struggle – free as wind, breath.
One day his children will laugh at him
when he stumbles demonstrating a somersault
and falls with the thud of soft fruit in the morning.
He will chase them in mock fury and try again
and soon he will find ways of teaching them
things he can no longer do himself, like seed
begat bud and bud, flower – a chain unbroken.
Even talents that have slept within him like French
double Ls, alleles in the helix of his life,
he will pass on, easy as the caress that stripped
their mother’s body, simple as a song
that beyond silence
lives on.
ix
If I speak now of day’s orange retreat and the lily
white of a moon’s rise, it is because
one dusk a kayak will lick the face
of Lake Volta, slick as a boat that once glided,
a man in its belly, towards the flower
of Guadeloupe. In it will be
a woman,
breath warm in light breeze,
her dark shadow skimming ripples –
island bound. You will neither see the fruit
in her lap, nor the seed in the fruit.
You will not hear the song
in her head. It is said
no man is an island, but perhaps
a woman is
because an island will bud,
will flower, will fruit – an island
knows the history-filled caress
of a bone-heavy sea, wet and clean
as glass; an island can hide rebels in its green,
can feed them bread as fruit and red flowers
as liquid; an island
can birth a man.
yorkshire bath displays
(or six ways of looking at a bath with dark brown legs walking the streets in northern England)
i – theft
The damn thing is stolen, he is
carrying it over his head
to evade cameras: cheeky lot,
these darkies, he’s using the overflow
hole for eyes.
ii – migration
See what people will do to avoid paying
for a taxi? That would be what? Fifteen
quid? These immigrants are just tight-
fisted. It’s ridiculous. ridiculous!
iii – africans
Africans! They can’t stop carrying things
on their heads if they try. Imagine
that! Lugging a bath across Leeds
on your head – remember that Yeboah fella?
He could strike a ball like a sledgehammer.
iv – theatre
It’s got to be one of those
new performance thingies. To see
people’s reactions, like. Didn’t you hear
about the one they did in
a beetle? I am
surprised that little thing
didn’t fall apart.
v – truth
NIGHT: A yorkshire man steals
a moment away from the bed, where
his children sleep, to rediscover his wife
in the bath. Her immigrant hands clenched
tight, he adjusts his head to carry
the weight of her pleasure on his tongue.
The contortions of their play, the heft
of his Caribbean roots and the ink of her
Indian know/ledge, wobble the tub’s legs.
It falls to the ground, water sloshing
like the Aire on a windy day. Surprisingly
the children do not stir, do not wake.
vi – summary
DAY: Buying a new bath is easy, getting
a van on a bank holiday is tricky – and...
hailing a taxi while west/black has many stories;
hailing a taxi while carrying a white bath is
another.
The Furnace
When you spend your childhood bathing
with cold water, you learn – quick
as lime – that soap
is warm enough to hold
back the chill of night
caught in bound oxygen;
that although moving fast will help
it’s better to stay even,
let your body heat find equilibrium;
that the earth takes the full brunt
of the sun’s burning
so it can guerrilla through the veins
of the water system
to infuse your post-football shower
with unexpected joy;
that your father carries the fires
of all his disappointments
under the coal of his skin; that
your mother’s embrace is a furnace.
Inheritance
Sometimes I overhear the muted
susurations of worms bent as hooks
into leaf-rich mounds of soil, the plea
of voices not meant for my ears. It is
gossip calculated as a rocket’s purest
arc, promises slipped into the ears of lovers,
hackneyed phrases like you’re only as young as
you feel – and my mind drifts to you; how
all your life you cried like a baby, never
controlled, your face a network of creases
that mapped your pain. You were my father
and I learned to love you with your face wet.
This may be