a twisted way
of saying thanks
for teaching me that even a life of nights still
whispers the sun’s burn, that the fluid of one’s
tears do not make the body boneless: it takes
strength to show how you feel but not waver
in your resolve, knowing the hourglass of healing
never loses its sand. Seeing you cry as a boy freed me,
pulled me from the vortex enough times to outspin
an unremarkable life: I have walked from light
into the comforts of darkness – rebirth canals –
confident that a path will unfold, the way
one did after I held dark soil in my teenage hands
and cast it on the wood of your departure, the way
this poem begins
with the invisible
prompting of ghosts
and ends with the soft lines of a questing pen,
like the earth cycling with the turning of nematodes
silent as DNA
in the darkness beneath my feet.
11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa
for Kakaiku & Ma Rainey
i - signs
Blood of mine, it is said... it was... an uncle
said someone has to stay behind, to receive
the letters, to tell the story (though not at leave
to read), but we both know that’s a Brer ruse,
a cousin-saving con: you stayed to flatten yourself
into signposts pointing away from where we fled to.
Brown as tree bark, expression wooden, you burned;
loath to give me up, you flamed as my wings bent.
I became wind; you became smoke - I see your signature
before it rains. I pour libation for your sacrifice;
your children sprinkle from 40s for my disappearance.
ii - lizards
It was as old Tom Wilson said later, Anyemi,
safer among the alligators, the swamp’s embrace
making mist of my tracks, shapeshifting my glaze
into scales. It was a measure of my fever that I fled
one white man to fight alongside another, held loyal
for a cold, hard promise. It’s the price of the ticket,
the cost of return: a will folded as achingly as our bodies
when we were tallied and shipped here. When you’re ready
Omanfo, when we sit one day to the agreement of two lizards -
one orange-flecked, the other with an orange band, you’ll see:
I’ll tell you how my veins knew ice to a Nova Scotian degree
iii - passing
One freezing night, in a dream, a pair of antlers
threw shadows hard as jail bars, cut across a wasteland,
blurred my vision. When I awoke I was unsure if the twin
shapes stood for us, but there is a proverb I now know,
Manyo; two antelopes do not solely roam for companionship
- one eats, the other watches. You didn’t flinch at the crossroad,
i’naa nabi, your genius for metaphor already clear as mead -
you factorised the 3/5 skewed algebra of liberation down
to (me - white) (you + white); you chose the plus sign,
you would ghost-pass: if phantoms are white, death is free.
Your cousin got freedom. I haven’t stopped moving since.
iv - earth, wind, water
Your totems hum still in the shrines we nested
in trees before ill winds blew white sheets to anchor
cargoes of wood and breathing greed off our warm shores.
Did we guess, or did we know - to riddle our prayers
into the pores of the earth herself, the rivers ciphered
slick with warnings? They began with mirrors, changeable
as their skins under sun, before they looted masks
with empty eyes - hollow songs, stretched goatskin under
untutored hands. Dead goats on their own can not bleat
the drum’s message; all the earth’s miles can’t sever song
from your tongue. I see your off/spring dance our river ‘(s) kin
v - fire
I will not speak of fire. You did not burn. Let me
tell you what I’ve learned; in one language, fire is
also invitation, you change the tone in another – blood,
in a third, fire is your father. It is not prestidigitation
that smoke casts shadows. You are the invisible man, Anyemi,
the woman at the back of a bus; I am the one who reclaimed
my name. I am my father’s second son; if I am missing
the first will be questioned. This is how our absence was
marked: girls and boys eating with twin names no one to watch,
fingers squeezing otɔ, but too distracted to know its fire –
an antelope with a single antler carries pain in the neck.
vi - bones
I will not speak of fire. You did not burn. Let me
tell you what I’ve learned; in one language, fire is
also invitation, you change the tone in another – blood,
in a third, fire is your father. It is not prestidigitation
that smoke casts shadows. You are the invisible man, Anyemi,
the woman at the back of a bus; I am the one who reclaimed
my name. I am my father’s second son; if I am missing
the first will be questioned. This is how our absence was
marked: girls and boys eating with twin names no one to watch,
fingers squeezing otɔ, but too distracted to know its fire –
an antelope with a single antler carries pain in the neck.
vii – paper
Some mornings my eyes water with your wounds, all
the tiny hairs that must have taunted the flames
before they spread their tongues on your skin. I am free
because you are smoke. I think of memory as retained folds
in paper that was once origami; I think of memory
as the layers an onion holds: both of them fade
in heat but something lingers; this be the twist
of DNA that syllabled Ebonics. Any rapper will know this;
that language is paper, that onions turn translucent
but collards stay green. I’m applauding you from outchea
money – mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo.
viii – language
When we pour Schnapps on the earth, when you tip
liquor onto concrete, it does not trickle into graves.
There is a place called sɛɛsane where the trees bloom
with hindsight; this is where our dear departed sit –
ancestors side-by-side with boys assassinated for skin
crimes: this is Africa, this is America. Our nyɛmɛɛ
and sisters have been showing them the charts, unspooling
the con: in that world darkness defines kinship
not language. Remember the snippets of that Song
of Solomon: because I am black; our bed is green... through
the lattice. Language is lattice – we are whole behind it.
ix – cracks/stone
I have learned the caution of geckos. Black
and pale, they pale into the cracks of barriers;
when they lose a tail it grows back. We have a history
hacked off by marauders: what we’re taught now is knowledge
without a body. My grandmother on home soil was one
of the first trained midwives we are told. We are left
though, with the mystery of her miracle birth; who first
cut the cord that bound her to water? Who delivered
all those babies on the plantations in the wading years before
their bodies were allowed to cross the threshold of hospitals
their chattelled fathe
rs muscled out of rocks both black and pale?
x – remains
If we have so many words for family, how
can you be gone? Brer, Anyemi, Omanfo, how
were we broken? I am thinking now of subtraction;
perhaps that is the unspoken angle, the unused eye.
The one whose fortune it is to stay behind may be as blessed
as cursed, for what becomes of the remainder after
the division? That little (r) stuck to its side like a sca(r)
while the rest take the ska? Breaking that beat, Money,
nobody is taken without family left behind, no chariot
rolls without leaving tracks. There are tears in our wake
enough to raise Jordan. The sea between us is common salt.
xi – helix
Listen, Ma, if between rainy days and blue skies
some fool asks you to prove it, don’t bother with ancestry
websites; I know by the way you walk you took fire
for me, I can hear in your voice the drums they forbade
you to play. Our unspoken pact was to somehow survive.
So hold my hands now, Ace, and let’s reshuffle, throw
out the balm of forgetting, read the boomerang’s marked hide.
You are no longer an antelope alone – we are an entire
herd. You can wade in the water. I’m looking out for you.
My antlers, like yours, (r) an eleven (11) on the head: multiplied
we equal 121 – one to one let’s unravel helices, let’s talk.
* Brer, Anyemi, Omanfo, Manyo, I’naa nabi, Money, Ma, Ace, Abusua – various words/slang for addressing family members
Tree of the Invisible Man
I can say nothing of its name, save the name
of the factory behind which it stood, the one bleeding
dyes all day, making gutters that once were streams
a carnival of bright death – green, red: Golden
Textiles. The tree itself was a lesson in the art
of contortion, its hard angles an eloquent semaphore;
clear lines of survival under abuse. It had a hole
right through its trunk. First we peeked through it,
but months later we stopped only to see who could
make a matching chink
through cellulose
– that narrow
body. I see its shape now as I close my eyes, the seven
punctures we managed to riddle it with, the pens it cost us,
coat hangers, twisted forks, a stolen corkscrew, the pale
gleam of those offerings at its base when the sun set;
the view through the gaps if you stepped back – squinted,
as though the eight holes were one, no bark between.
Its dark roughness is the skin I inhabit in this dream
where I’m away from home, visible as a threat, unnoticed
though breathing. I count the bullets shot by ganged boys
in blue, measure their circumference against my skin:
calibre, quantity per dark double, drawing a map of round
fissures where my flesh should be,
flood of projectiles at my feet. The view
clears as I squint,
my reflection shines
like water at sunset.
The whole widens.
One night, I am all mirror – no flesh.
Defences
i
You must learn to walk on water, if you want
to live in a place that does not flood.
You raise your eyebrows levée-like and I nod
thinking of how beneath the highs of cities
like Paris and New York, beyond the accessible depths
of Metro and Subway, the mapped grids where
you can pay to travel to hearth or heartbreak,
there are conduits for liquid: tunnels, storm
drains large enough to harbour a parade of liars.
ii
When my uncle Freddie dies
you hold my hand in a damp grip,
which reminds me of our first sweat-
heavy coupling in Accra under a fan,
while I tell you stories my father told
me about Freddie’s incredible prowess
at sport, how he later escaped
a kidnap plot by a corrupt government
by hiding in the boot of a Welsh
lecturer’s car as she drove to Abidjan
for a weekend tryst. But we are
both stunned at his funeral as three
previously unknown children of his
emerge from beneath the high pitch
of the voice reading his obituary,
their eyes damp with love that belies
distance. They will later reveal
that one weekend a month he collected
each of them from their mothers,
took them to a quiet beach house
with a view of the stars. He fed them
breakfasts of fresh fish, grilled
on the shore, taught them sprinting
and salsa, talked about physics
and politics. Strange but wonderful
father, they say, after you have
wiped my tears with your pinky.
iii
One day, when we are no longer together
I find myself under a fan in Singapore
thinking about the sheen of sweat that brewed
on your skin when we made love, the glow
fired from the blood vessels beneath it –
all ten thousand kilometres of them alive
to the transition we were making from steady
to ecstatic; how you tried to hold in your screams
and dissolved into manic giggles – your thighs clamps,
my body iron. I reflect on those moments anew
because the woman resting on my bare back
in the humid Straits afternoon has sweat
far less salty than yours and it set me
thinking about storm drains and what secrets
lie in the water they carry, the seas they empty
into, how you can never tell how much
salt hides in a tear
or a drop of sweat
without letting it ride
the ridges of your tongue.
And if the heart pumps blood
and blood is ninety-two percent water,
how much salt
will sour a heart?
Whose water gets walked on?
sub.marine.blues
sub
This one
is like midnight sea
dark and powerful
lashed
with ripples over an age-
old soul.
There are grey foam patches
in the night
of his head.
That one
is like midnight seen,
predictably dense,
hunched
over his own seed,
unaware of time,
determined still to change
everything ductile
And this one goes still to sea,
though less now.
He has taken what he can
and mainly mends nets
in blue arcs
contoured by experience
to eke the best years
out of a fishing net.
Yet that one rips them
far too frequently;
dragging smiles
from this one who knows
failure is heard
louder than advice.
That
one will learn.
and who knows
if midnight is the child
of midnight sea
since neither is permanent
though one is more
tangible.
But these men pull both in
from seventeen to seventy;
hand following hand
father after son
and never have their boats lacked
a man
to go
to sea.
marine
The story is told of one
old fisherman who woke up
in the dead of night, yelled
ee’ba eei, ee’ba kɛ loo
(“it is coming
it is laden with fish.”)
So deep
did the rhythm of the tides throb
in his veins, that he sensed
the moment
the jubilant buoys
began
to drift back to shore
sure;
these men don’t see
in the submarine darkness
of their calling, they feel.
Isolated from the stability of land,
they use stars for landmarks
and seek their dreams in the reflections
of heaven. In the old man’s youth
they would push their canoes out
until half submerged
in blue, then they paddled smooth
as beaten leather, leaving
lather in their wake
and messages sketched
on the sea’s veneer
by their trailing nets.
Now, the guttural grunts of gunmetal
black outboard motors
violate air and sea
as they Doppler
in and out of view
at double the speed;
the canoes stabbing
urgently against the horizon.
The old men sit
at the water’s end
barefoot
on the battered shells of worn out vessels
sharing tales of those who did not return.
weaving webs of blue into broken nets.
Occasionally they help pull in the laden nets.
“Ee’ba eei,” they yell “it is coming”
watching the nearing boats, the buoys marking
the net edges. taking care not to wade out
too far.
blues
Greek mythological claims
of the greatest beauties
and most powerful gods
stem from saved documents.
but truth cannot be written.
The many nets of interpretation
it filters through before it pen drops