Literal Silhouette 

Chris Ofili, 2015 @ New Museum

Wise women made of reeds

Rushing into water well above their knees.

Women carrying children, carrying incense, carrying

Scent of themselves,

And the men in their sacks.

Women, lionesses all, who work those bales

Like thread, in and out of economies of loss.

Locusts collecting where their hair begins

Hovering for the color, sweat and scent

of women.

Woman, do you know your worth?

Are you handed a crown, or did you twist it at the shores

From your magic?

From lotus flower petals and cattails and your own crazy…

From all those tears you dropped

the river flooded

the heart paused, stopped with blood.

What was he to you,

Cat’s toy, or true love?

The sphinx rose at dawn, and lay low under the sun,

Waiting for him to slip by. She set her net

And caught him…

Lines dropped from the clouds.

Like fish they slipped through the water blind to all

But movement.

Put yourself there, and watch

The current steal your silver catch.

What was he to you, but a moment you looked

Finally into the water.

No Narcissus are you, rather wakened from blindness

To see the sun…

Hovering always, a halo of black and dark and twisted

And shining in that sun,

Yellow as white, as a night that prays for morning light,

Falling and laying and lying, and flying

Twisted as man and woman, and night

Laying down finally

Where arms are there, and softness is there,

And she can breathe.

an odyssey just here ................ [draft]

Black Odyssey, Romare Bearden

He is at sea.
she is on land.
the irony of her tidepool
feeding on savanna, drawing down seeds
as his horizons grow dark
with stars cast on slack tide
oceans flat and full of mirages

at sea, or at sky?

sand collects at the edges
(his dry kisses)
where young red crabs crawl out
searching under the wide moon
for an easy current

the square-rig of deep ocean
planes, sails slack
and hanging down
waiting to breathe...
(salt on the tongue and in the eyes)

she closes her eyes
reaches out
like a whale she throws her life
against the current

neither the first woman to wait on a man,
nor will she be the last.
cut your tongue and open your eyes,
you are not the first to journey,
albatross slung under your chin,
and longed-for high grasses hallucinated
at your shoulders (her hands, her scent).

swim or hike, traveler,
back to your own bood-bearing chest
(she does not let slip a single drop).

Works in progress... continue.

"The moon and the stars were the gifts she gave..."
                                          - Johnny Cash

Swoon, Brooklyn Museum 2014

The sun and the moon,
bodies of power, both:
he warms her heart,
her face reflects his fire.

She smiles because he watches,
though she wait the days to hold his gaze.
He shines because it is his to do...
creating savanna from stone.

She is the reason
he lives at night:
to come home to her arms.
She holds him as none other:
he will only warm her, luminous shy rock that she be.

In his embrace, she is
made a heart-beating stone:
a lover finally, a mother firmly,
she brings the tide to his warm shores.

in Progress

Forgiveness was a fire by the road.
It was a fire I made,
and a fire I could extinguish.
It was made of my own skin and smile,
my own voice, the timbre of my ears' echo in my own mind.

The rattle of old bones shaking in my skull
-quivering in pain of the race-
was enough to tear down the house
and wake me from the dead of my sleep.
What was their message?

The die was cast, my own die,
and I looked down into my hands.
The baby I was looked back.
And she could still be saved,
by the fire, by the road.--



Sun is shining:

Unfinished

Since I've begun writing my own book (Superchampbooks.com! boo-yah!) I haven't gotten out to see much art. There are lots I have wanted to see: Basquiat, the Native exhibit at the Met, Jacob Lawrence... the list goes on.

But I am making my own art.

In the meantime, we are all making works of art of our lives. They are always unfinished. And every step is another possible mistake that may remake us entirely, or destroy something precious, leaving us where we began, only this time... faithless?

Every leap of faith is just this: another possible perfect mistake, or another possible drop into yet a new level of hell.

I've spent the last few weeks in a fog of quiet and withdrawal. I have pulled back from almost everything, dwelling in my book, my past, from whence I came. Not only my past but the present created by my past, brought forward every moment in gestures, in memories, in the reflections we regard in the faces of those we love and strangers alike.

I reflect not only on mistakes, but moments of faith. Moments that allowed me to do what I believed in, when I soldiered in pure will through what seemed like jungles so thick with trouble I had forgotten what horizon felt like.

And it's all still a work in progress. As we speak I continue to make leaps of faith in love, continue to battle with old habits that I know will bring me nothing I want. And I write. As life is ever a work in progress, so are the poems I share this month.

Selection from [artist unkown], Yale Art Gallery, 2014

Sleepy claws
separate the haze,
a lazy gesture from the dream world
of freighters and smoke stacks
and water towers.

Something smells like cooking coal fire,
old things burnt away,
no longer necessary;
better they feed a new life.

The growl from your throat in
my ears, unawake...
the fog lingers at my window
and carries my dreams to cloud people.

Thunder and lemons scent the neighborhood.
Our children sleep well tonight
while we lay, side by side,
watching the savanna for signs.

My Savanna                                                                          [draft]

This savanna

Laid out in the night

Breathing in, breathing out,

Sand and earth and dry leaves

That circle before falling to their places.

In this way, now, I breathe you,

In and out, making your way; you circle above my mouth.

Earthly things find their places again.

Just as you will find your way, back from the hunt

To my hearth.

Coals remain.

Blue and black and purple,

Your marks on my skin may have faded,

But your presence from my heart

Bleeds throughout:

Your tracks through my savanna.

For Kehinde Wiley

Last Born

Who are you, last born?

What did you know, lying on your mother’s chest,

A twin in the world,

Separated from mother and brother?

What flesh did you speak,

Thin paint of meat dense as clay?

And what did you orbit,

Your hands passing one over another?

Taking flowers in hand:

The magnolias are huge and pressing down,

A weight, a carriage of this child,

Heavy and pulling you toward earth.

He is, she is. They are here with you,

Ladies dressed like ladies,

And men dressed like royalty.

Lotus flowers, perfect as complete.

A red, a green, a royal purple paint.

All yours, layed down in lead and oil,

Okra and goat,

And the skins kicked on a wet green field.

Standing atop the sword,

Leaning on manhood and floating in womanhood,

Men, you know your women,

And women you are held in your men.

Hands passing one over the other

And through one another’s hair, falling

Like water, from rocks to rocks,

And roots to soil.

Vines crawl up your skin, gentlemen,

Like the eyes of women who will see you.

Will they follow her?

Will she lead them to you, through you, from her heart?

Will they see you as they see her?

Will the beating train run down on you,

As softly as her? Taking you in hand,

Handing you a tender A train throne?

Can you be mine, less strong, more strong,

Finally neither less nor more, but a Cyrus

Who surrenders to Maria and lets her hands run through

Those tight dark curls?

Let your head fall down, man,

A sword will not fall on your neck, while she stands by.

All images

Kehinde Wiley

Brooklyn Museum

A New Republic, 2015

Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2014*2015

I have seen Xu Bing's two phoenixes at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine three times. They are huge soaring birds, suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral, and they are made of trash.

Trash soaring through a holy sky.

Now, I'm either old school or new age, but for me there are other holy spaces. Most likely landfills and garbage dumps are going to classify as holy with me. Some people say his work is about finding the humane in those who are thrown away as trash, discounted and marginalized. But I wrote about that recently in Odysseus and I don't want to write about it again, primarily because it makes me feel sad. [Full disclosure: I watched an old episode of The West Wing last night and I cried when they talked about the 17 year old gay kid who was stoned to death, naked, and then again when the homeless Korean War vet was buried and Toby (probably an HSP) flinched.]

Anyway, it's not such a great intuitive leap on my part to see these birds rising from the ashes of our trash. What is, however, a great leap is actually rising from ashes. 

I've spent the last few years taking down some faulty foundations in my life, and that means having to rebuild some new ones. Am I building the new foundations differently, or is it the same old trash just in a new place?

I'm sure some of it is the same old trash, but maybe I'm using new mortar. Some pieces of me are never going to change, hard-wired, not my choice. That I am more aware of them and choose to embrace rather than hate on them now may mean I have new mortar: same product + new process = different result. Much like Xu Bing's work: same trash, new form, different result. How does one accomplish that?

I got a little Buddhist on myself. A couple months ago I decided to stop judging my feelings and the resulting decisions I made. I used to weigh every impulse and dwell on it: but is that the right thing to do? What will that mean? What will happen? Will I get the result I want if I do this thing I want to do because of how I feel? That's a pretty good way to end up living on a landfill made of your own trash: feeling responsible for things you can neither control nor predict, and winding up paralyzed by the fear of making a wrong move... implying that the very fact of who you are and how you feel may prevent you from getting what you want.

In the end, I remember the biggest mistake I made when I built those false foundations: I had thrown out myself. She was one of those one-eyed blinking dolls, half bald and half naked outside Mexico City. And I was not very different: one-eyed, half bald and freezing in New York City. 

I don't think we can ever predict how someone else will react to our trash. But we can define how we treat who we are. Hold onto yourself, and you're already flying.

Amor Ankara

My bones rattle like beads in a turtle shell--

Because I’d let it go, seen death,

regarded and admitted a dark north night.

And then the drums from deep under:

Stomping grass and chicken dance because you’re on my mind, again;

Did someone give me permission to wake you from the dead, my silent exiled lover…?

The dead father of my future unborn children:

A día de los muertos love all covered in Mayan death masks

And painted over with marigolds.

The Mexican wedding cookies are delicious,

Like your cold fingers,

All chocolate-y among the sugar skulls.

Our ghost children look on in the kente dresses I make for them in my dreams,

And my son still says your name sometimes,

And I may not be with you, my witch doctor magician,

But I still make the dishes because I like their flavor

as I liked to taste you in all your earthy musky scent,

Covered in working cotton all day, even your stress sweat smelled good to me.

I’m a forest widow, living in some strange fairy tale:

Marriage of dead ghosts and spirit husbands who walk in the night,

And I hear the broken branches but never see those eyes,
And the vines hang down, a web weave fog of breath between us,

And the forest and her mmotia are quick to cover for you, taking their ghost back,

So your human love cannot reclaim you over the River Styx.

Pan plays his flute, and Cupid falls asleep,

And I lay like Venus, awake and pining for my Mars

Called away again into the ghosts and vines of his own mind,

Stealing him from me, stealing him from light,

Letting nothing grow

But vines that he must fight.

 Night & Day

Chris Ofili, Annunciation, The New Museum, Jan 2015

I reach to your branch.
I reach around wet bark
and beg to be razed.




Your black eyes burn
me up to cinders, ashes,
screaming on the rock.




I want your hands:
my skin disintegrates
ashen back to earth.

Chris Ofili, _Nirvana, The New Museum, Jan 2015

Your hand on my leg
burns through to bone taking with
it all my tears.



Day covers night
like a woman and her man; he
is taken away.

Chris Ofili, The New Museum, Jan 2015

Your sand skin sees
my otherwise unknown: this
body, dawn broken.






Salamander mine,
Deep in this soil: also
Mine, also yours.