In The Poetry

Many of my poems have been about the history of the Negro people. In this poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, I try to link, in terms of the rivers we have known, Africa, the land of our ancestors, and America, our land today.

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than [...]

The Tin Wash Dish

Lank poverty, dank poverty,
its pants wear through at fork and knee.
It warms its hands over burning shames,
refers to its fate as Them and He
and delights in things by their hard names:
rag and toejam, feed and paw -
don’t guts that down, there ain’t no more!
Dank poverty, rank poverty,
it hums with a grim fidelity
like [...]

Artichoke

The nubbed leaves
come away
in a tease of green, thinning
down to the membrane:
the quick, purpled,
beginnings of the male.

Then the slow hairs of the heart:
the choke that guards its trophy,
its vegetable goblet.
The meat of it lies, displayed,
up-ended, al dente,
the stub-root aching in its oil.

The Pattern

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding
When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you
And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope
The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride’s dress,
Complicated instructions for stitching bodice
And skirt, box pleats and hems, tissue-paper outlines,
Semblances of skin which I nervously unfold
And hold up in snow-light, for snow [...]

The next poem is about music and a teenage son practising a piano in the middle of the night.

The Piano

The last bus sighs through the stops of the sleeping suburb
and he’s home again with a click of keys, a step on the stairs.
I see him again, shut in the upstairs sitting-room
in that huge Oxfam overcoat, [...]

Elephant Eternity

Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees
Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees
Elephants elephants walking like time

Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river
Fountaining their children in the mothery river
Elephants elephants bathing like happiness

Strong and gentle elephants
Standing on the earth
Strong and gentle elephants
Like peace

Time is walking under elephant trees
Happiness is bathing in the elephant river
Strong gentle peace is [...]

I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy in a place as I was in the Arctic, midwinter. The landscape had been simplified by darkness and snow but was actually full of traces of colour and light. And the most thrilling moment was towards the end of the day when there would be a kind [...]

The Pines of Rome

As ghosts of old legionaries, of the upright
farmers of that unbelievable republic,
the pines entail their roots among the rubble
of baroque and modern Rome.

Out by the catacombs they essay a contradiction,
clattering their chariot-blade branches to deny
the Christian peace, the tourist’s easy frisson,
a long transfiguration.

Look away from Agnes and the bird-blind martyrs,
the sheep of [...]

The Dance

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, [...]

My grandmother, Mosure, my mother’s mother lived all of her life in Clayton County, Iowa. And when I was a little boy I spent weeks there in the summer. And this is a description of my grandmother’s kitchen as I saw it years after she had gone.

A Room in the Past

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains [...]