How they will go on to say,
That’s the height of a giraffe!
The length of a Humpback Whale calf
at birth!
The length of the letters individually undone in this very book!
The length
of my
cooing for
Kanye!
Coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Kanye must know, from his year in China, that there,
the heart is not what controls love.
It is the stomach, the gut,
that which moans in the night.
SEEING KANYE
Along the Juniata, the gray stones,
gray squares in the grass,
keep the hills from the road, keep them
where they are.
When we pass the stones,
like the Earth’s stitches,
I know we’re about to see a rock face
following a bend in the road,
where the strata bend like sound waves.
It’s clear God is below the Earth, not above—
his head, giant frame for the planet—
and he makes a sound that makes the Earth.
But first I thought of Kanye’s head
singing, singing, singing into that rock.
the fallible face
KANYE WEST, “Through the Wire,” line 6 of verse 2
MYTHIC
The world’s on the back of a turtle, on the back of a turtle, on the back of a turtle,
on the back of Kanye.
Eve gave Kanye the apple—after Kanye was formed of dust from the ground.
Kanye was raised by a nymph and not eaten by his Titan father.
With a giant axe, Kanye separated the murky Yin and clear Yang.
Kanye once grew from the ocean and reached the clouds in the sky.
And Kanye almost died in a car accident,
so he became a star.
GOD CREATED NIGHT AND IT WAS NIGHT
Let there be Kanye at the wheel of a black SUV.
Let Kanye fall asleep.
Let the SUV hit another car with another man.
Let that man’s legs break and be broken.
Let Kanye be trapped in the car.
Let there be the men that cut him out.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Let Kanye’s mother and girlfriend arrive.
Let the women take care of him.
Let Kanye see his face.
Let the doctor reconstruct his face.
Let Kanye have the breath of life.
Let Kanye lie that he had not fallen asleep.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Let Kanye tell the truth.
Let Kanye’s jaw be wired shut.
Let Kanye write a song.
Let Kanye sing it through that wire.
Let the song reach over all the earth.
Let lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon Kanye.
Bring forth Kanye according to his kind.
KANYE’S SKELETAL SYSTEM
206 bones, filled with marrow, connected
by tendons, ligaments, fitted in joints,
divided into axial and appendicular skeletons.
Bones break, fracture. They bruise. Sometimes,
kissing contusions.
The Googled images for this show
scans and x-rays of knees, and couples kissing,
and pictures of Rihanna with Chris Brown.
Oh god, fact-checker.
Kanye has broken his bones.
But no matter how many places the skull
is broken, it’s only one bone breaking.
First, a baby will have a skeleton completely
of cartilage.
In the fourth month of pregnancy, it begins to turn to bone.
And then I’ll hold onto those bones forever.
Kanye, I could tell you so many more things about the bones.
I could tell you to drink your milk.
I could imagine you in the 80’s “got milk?” ads.
That ad campaign began in 1993.
Fact-checker, please.
You’re no better. What are you really thinking?
Kanye, did your mother, in her hands,
hold your broken face?
So swollen.
Could she?
THE FALLIBLE FACE
featuring Emmanuel Levinas
1
While firemen worked to get Kanye out,
he talked with his mother on the phone,
apologized for getting himself hurt.
2
The airbag had not deployed and his head had smashed against the steering wheel.
His mother got on a plane.
there is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense
He was swollen.
He was indistinguishable.
this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face
His mother wrote how she controlled her expressions,
how she told his girlfriend how to behave.
the epiphany of the face is ethical
Women are familiar with how not to scare
someone who’s in danger.
3
The plastic surgeon was a bit of eye candy
his mother wrote.
the face … formulates the first word
It might be love, or attraction, or
humanity.
4
Kanye, you must have a relationship with your reflection I can’t understand.
To structure, to surgery, to form.
in the access to the face there is certainly also an access to the idea of God
How did they put you together again?
How did you feel when someone saw you who didn’t know
you had ever looked like someone other
than yourself?
in the access to the face there is certainly also an access to the idea of God
The metal plate in your chin follows the bone.
The metal plate in your chin might ache.
5
Regardless of his face, Kanye is not always treated like a man.
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME I’VE WONDERED
My favorite part of Donda West’s Raising Kanye is from the chapter “Through the Wire: The Accident,” when she sits at Kanye’s bedside contemplating the attractiveness of the doctor, saying even that Billy Dee and Denzel Washington could not compare.
I want to spend my poem smiling.
Billy Dee, Donda? Lando Calrissian of Star Wars? Yes!
But all I can think is, where is your father, Kanye?
Where is he?
Where is he?
Where is he?
IN SONG
After the accident, Kanye West wrote, produced, and recorded a song.
“Through the Wire.”
As the title suggests, Kanye rapped every word through his wired-shut jaw.
The first verse says:
Recently, Kanye compared himself to Emmett Till again.
On one website they explain: “discussing the VMA incident … he compared the backlash he faced to the murder of Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager who was killed for whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi.”
People have been outraged, but Kanye must
feel a connection to this boy. And because of Kanye,
Emmett’s story is on the internet again and again. 65 years later.
Kanye knows what appropriation is.
SO KANYE TRANSFORMED HIMSELF, PRODUCER TO SUPERSTAR
What do I know about being saved?
In one video game I watch Noah play,
he points his gun at his friend and shoots him to heal him.
My grandfather died despite treatment.
My mother’s treatment did everything it should.
And I’ve never been
in danger. I’ve hardly ever
been on high balconies or rooftops.
But Kanye’s been at risk. In an interview, he was asked,
“Given that you had a near-death experience as you recount on ‘Through the Wire,’ what are your beliefs on death? Reincarnation?”
He answered, “I feel like I’m here for a reason.”
Why, Kanye? What’s the reason?
Kanye said, “I don’t believe in reincarnation. Sometimes I wonder if I believe in heaven. I know I believe in Jesus.”
This was not your first car accident.
My grandfather was never in car accidents
though he was legally blind in one eye.
An instance of saving I failed to notice?
My grandfather believed. He looked at the stars as proof
long after he stopped going to synagogue.
Kanye understood his belief—“I think 50% because it was instilled in me.
That’s what we call on.”
50% because you were saved?
What is it about being saved?
The best I know about saving is from childhood.
Jesus resurrected. Moses parting the sea. A Holocaust survivor.
Or one friend who refused to wear her seatbelt
because a relative lived when he didn’t wear one.
Miraculous survival. Shock tumble through the air.
And I thought my friend was unreasonable.
I don’t know how to be shaken,
to embrace a new belief,
but Kanye does.
dear donda
KANYE WEST, “Hey Mama,” line 17 of verse 1
ADVENTURES
5 year anniversary of Katrina already.
I remember Bush reading a story to a classroom of children and not leaving. The book upside down.
Do I want to believe that?
No, that was after the planes flew into the World Trade Center.
On NBC, Kanye spoke out. I watched this clip over and over. He looks like he’s going to cry. He says, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” and they change who the camera’s on.
They moved to Chris Tucker, stumbling over every scripted word.
Then, on ABC, an interview, “I’m working—I’m working off the cusp here. I’m working off the top of my mind. I’m not reading the teleprompter. I’m letting—I’m speaking from the heart, and that thing got dialed up and typed—typed into the heart. And that was that.”
“Do you think it was fair?” asked the interviewer. But that wouldn’t be my first question.
How does your heart work?
What else in the body could be the teleprompter?
The internet winds around. Not too many links before I find an interview between Larry King and Dr. Jan Adams, the cosmetic surgeon who operated on Kanye’s mother the day before she died.
Adams went on the show to formally announce that he would
not partake in the interview at the wishes of the West family.
I’m disgusted by him because I’ve begun to love
your mother.
I’m working in the darkness between her teeth. I’m
reading
the measurements of her skull which is an excuse
to put my fingers in her hair.
She dedicated a whole chapter of her memoirs, Raising Kanye, to what he said about Bush and Katrina, to their trip to Houston. They brought Halloween masks to the children. And fifteen furnished homes for fifteen families for one year.
Though no one reported on this. Not one Houston Chronicle article.
Kanye had said, in that NBC clip, “I’ve even
been shopping before
even giving a donation, so now I’m calling
my business manager
right now to see what’s—what is the biggest
amount I can give.”
What is the biggest amount so that how
much remains?
I can’t look up something like that.
A number I can’t imagine.
After the earthquake in Haiti, Noah and I
donated $20 at Wegman’s
and our cashier told us it was the largest
donation all day.
In one verse, in 2007, Kanye raps, “ ,” and I would guess he dreams about Katrina.
About making a song, Kanye said, “I think about how people will react when they hear this. I think about how they will react to a certain point in the song. So, you know, a lot of time I try to build it up like an adventure.”
And he does. And they are.
And I can imagine the water beginning to enter the house.
KANYE’S CIRCULATORY SYSTEM
upon the two-year anniversary of the death of my grandfather Allen
The blood helps because the heart helps because the electricity moves us.
Kanye, my circulatory system looks like yours. So you too have a soft vein
too big for your temple, a pulse in your thumb. You’re still losing your mother.
One reporter called your mother’s death “ .”
I apologize for him. He thinks, maybe, two years is a long time.
Last year, in Princeton, I tutored a sixth grader in every subject. As he learned
the systems of the body, I did too, beginning with the diagram of the heart.
What new words did you learn then? What new procession of breath
did you practice when I was teaching a boy how to say vena cava and aorta,
when I drew hearts on a chalkboard for him, day after day, and erased,
with my finger, the holes for the pulmonary veins to come in, to
fill the left atrium with the blood we could not draw? You recorded a song.
I’d love if you’d recorded a song. I almost forget again that your heart
looks like mine. You’ve heard the pulse in your ears then. You know
wush is not a foolish way to describe it. You miss her and I miss him but
I WANT A HOUSE TO RAISE MY SON IN
1
I feel common.
There are people who want the house I want.
And if my desires are not unique,
what is?
A combination of my desires and my face
and the mud in the yard I don’t yet have?
2
It’s the worst time to be feeling this way,
when my legs are getting caught
on chairs and other places
I try to leave.
My hips just aren’t able to hold myself
together anymore, so ready to bear
his terrible head—as when terrible
was used to describe God and Godly
everything.
3
I can hardly make it through.
Sleep comes and bends
my hands into positions of habit,
pinching the fluids that should move
like little fish through my wrists,
and shit. Shit. If I were my hand,
I’d be drowned. My hand is one
more part of me, maybe the last,
to realize I’m deathly ill, in that,
I could die from this.
4
I have made Noah promise he will save me over the boy
if it came to that.
I’ve told no one this.
It is my one non-maternal act, my one feeling
that reminds me of the selfish child I was
when I thought how I would have spit and peed
on the Torah if I’d been a child in the Holocaust,
if it would have saved me,
which, only as an adult do I understand,
could not have saved me.
I think I will be damned, killed, struck,
for not only admitting these betrayals,
but writing them down.
I’m afraid I will be a horrible mother because
I am a horrible woman.
5
Can I write anything after that?
Can the poem continue?
Can I return to my love for my son?
Can I tell how I imagine burying my nose
in his soft, small belly,
how I imagine making him the best room,
the best crib and chest of drawers?
One day we will redecorate his room as
he wants. And we
will play basketball in the driveway
at the house—
the house I want so badly for him.
6
I lie in bed, as I can hardly leave it now,
and read books about Kanye. I page through
the one about Kanye’s Glow in the Dark tour.
It reminds me of my son’s bones, glowing white
in ultrasounds, in a more wretched darkness.
Donda made it seem easy in her memoir.
To love Kanye. To unconditionally love him.
She even knew he was a boy. In utero.
My son remains my mystery.
The ultrasounds revealing him
well-formed. No clubbed foot.
Black stomach means he can
swallow. Black bladder means
his kidneys are working. Heart
can be seen in detail, valves,
deep inside me. His hair grown.