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 Jean
Anaporte-Easton: 'Gift' and the other poems in this issue are
part of a book, The Crazy Dog Dance, due from 13th Moon Press
around the first of the year. She is also the editor of
Breathing From the Belly, Etheridge Knight on Poetry and
Freedom, to be published by the University of Michigan Press in
2009.
April Rising
It's 3 a.m. and Fort Darwin has just been
recaptured or Georgia's parliament stormed.
In Brazzaville, young men cradling AK 47’s
cruise the streets, though a bulletin's too brief
to say who's hurt and how, who died. But here
in America, a quiet rain is releasing
this city. It eases the hard cement the trees
growing greenly in the dark pit of me
sprout words, they settle into shapes in the head
lines on pages, being like rain,
gray rain raising the earth smell gleaming
the crowned streets, a city's benison.
The earth smell rises, the round stones
squat their toes dug deeply in soil
the green fringing them springs intricately
rooted from the earth we smell
and lie down on to watch the clouds
days when rain does not raise
the earth smell, bright-winged from
bush to bush birds cheep and fly,
bugs glint, the clouds roll over
and we pull our sweaters back over
our heads while cows nuzzle
the grass they will lie in, bite off
clumps and chew through sun and shade and flies.
No matter what the sky does, when
it is evening, we will lie down. Someday
stones will crouch on the earth where we lie
being the green growing in the pit
of us, words growing out of this rain even
when we feel blank and don't care, rising
out of our mouths, words, still there
this rain blurring the night and loosening
the sky still at 4 a.m. The fort
was recaptured an hour ago, dead sprawl
the streets of Brazzaville, and still no statement
from the regime of the besieged president
hiding in a bunker on a country estate. Yet
here, in this barely dawn the sky
blesses us while the cows stand or lie down.
The
Basics
for Melville March 2000-January 29 2005
All I want is to pet you.
All you want is to
be fed. All I want is
for you to sleep
in my room
and breathe.
She Who Eats
You put food in the mouth,
it becomes flesh. You grow your body
into life, it beckons
it becomes
a wail high as a wall
a wall
wide as an empty road at night
It beckons
you stutter, you stumble
the body into life
wide as an empty road
high as an empty night
I know I shouldn't.
Shouldn't chokes you.
It beckons, it becomes
a wide road at night
***
She inherits a house, brick.
Inside, mahogany gleams.
A dusk-blue couch,
draperies soothe.
To the left, her study,
to the right, stairs.
Bedrooms, and beyond
a playroom.
Covering
a nursery-high table,
an unfinished picture,
a story of many parts,
abandoned.
When she looks up, the back wall
is missing. Across a dirt road
a wooden house sits with
its front wall sheered off.
A child sits upstairs in an empty
room, her smocked dress pulled over
her knees. She hugs
them to her chest.
She should go downstairs and read
in her mahogany study. She should
cross the dirt road and rescue
the child. She takes a nap.
*****
At night the body stumbles
into life,
it becomes a shape,
a winged horse
with a woman's head.
A horse
at home in the three realms
that tolerate flesh.
****
At night the body
stumbles into
life.
It beckons, it becomes
a high wail
a wall.
You put food in the mouth
the body
swells
the belly pushes the thighs merge.
I know you shouldn't.
It beckons,
it becomes
a wall
a high wail
a roar, a lion. You grow
the body into life,
a lion
beckons, it roars.
It roars and devours,
it is its body fed
with food into power.
She is
she is her body fed
with food into life.
***
You put food in the mouth
it becomes flesh.
You grow the body into
life
it beckons
it wails, it stutters
it stumbles
it struggles to become
it struggles to be
to move
without falling apart
to meld the pieces
into one whole
You put food in the mouth,
it becomes flesh. First you prey,
then you chew.
You put the body into
life it
beckons
it wails, it becomes
a wail, a prayer
*********
This is a prayer. I'm praying right now.
a prayer
a sward of animals.
They put food in the mouth
they tear and swallow, they lie down
they sleep in piles
heads on haunches
they sleep in praise of their gods.
A prayer beckons
so the person
so the parts of the person
so the people
along the empty road at night
can come together
and be.
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