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.

the black odyssey

-romare bearden-

why is this lowercase? why are black letters always smaller, diminutive, minority?

Romare Bearden, Black Odyssey, 1977

BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO BE. JUST TO SURVIVE, THEY HAVE TO WRITE THEMSELVES INTO A SYSTEM THAT HAS MADE NO SPACE FOR THEM, THAT LEAVES NOT A BREATH TO BE TAKEN BY THEM: FIND THE WEE SPACES, THE SPACES BETWEEN SPACES, THE SPACES IGNORED BY THE SYSTEM THAT HAS WRITTEN THEM INTO THE MARGINS.

I saw the Black Odyssey by Romare Bearden at Columbia yesterday with my sister and my son. Two weeks ago we saw the Matisse exhibit, very much upper case, at MoMA. Lines out the door, timed tickets, crammed galleries.

This fall a good friend of mine was working on a thesis in which he would project a new Afrofuturism: a future in which black culture is regarded, precious, archived. I don't know what happened, but his work is not seeing the light - marginalized, once more? Who here knows about the Bearden exhibit? Who has read William Wells Brown's Clotel? If you've read Octavia Butler or Ishmael Reed, if you've seen Bearden, then maybe you're reading between the lines. But most people aren't, or can't.

Romare Bearden, Black Odyssey, 1977

I find it impossible to ignore what Bearden paints in his collage - a writing of black experience on a hallowed white classic. I also see what I think many of us see when I look at his collage collection: not an Odyssey, but a slave trade. I cannot help but see the history of murder, rape, forced assimilation. But how could Bearden paint that? How could he speak that violence, that grand tragedy in but the margins?

Bearden takes it all back here. He puts Black faces, Black skin into the history, rewriting history - no, Black history is not "folk" stories, and tales of little black Sambo; black history is majestic, it is mythologic, it tells of who we are, what we've become: all of us; and it cannot be cast into the margins, because it is the story. It is not a sub-plot, a veering lane. It is the story - it is the story of humanity. What do we as a people make of ourselves? Bearden writes himself, his people into the accepted, hallowed opus.

I will not fit myself into cracks. I will paste myself up. I will cover the old, I will assert myself. "AM I NOT A MAN?" My history will not be marginalized. My people are here and we will lay ourselves on, we will be heard, we will be known. We will be recognized.

Romare Bearden, Black Odyssey, 1977

So, what then? Still a slave trade? Or is this a great hero who conquers all his enemies to return to his home, to come home to his rightful life?  To the life he made, he earned, he built with tears, sweat, blood. Perhaps these stories are the Afrofuturism. Perhaps Bearden painted the future: black people, brown people, red people rising up to claim their places of heroism in the story of humanity, to take their seats at the table of humanity, to reclaim their rightful inheritance.

Perhaps Black Odysseus returns home to an America that needs him desperately - a warrior who has survived his tests, seen it all, knows what lurks out there all too well, come home ready to reclaim his title, spread the knowledge, use his experience, and lead the people.

In an ancient First Nations tale, each hue of humankind was given a strength, emblematic in an element: white holds fire, yellow holds air, red holds earth, and black holds water. Water was always the hardest to define because it is the source. It is intuition, soul, the voice we sometimes ignore, are at times unable to hear, that will be heard, one way or another. It is the voice of source, but we can claim its knowledge only with courage.

Perhaps Black Odysseus knows water. Perhaps humanity needs to hear him, not only to survive, but to become human.

Dedicated to the memories of Michael Brown, baby Kai, and Eric Garner.

Violence

Robert Davidson, NMAI, Spring 2014

This Violence

To touch you

I stand back.

To see you I stay blind.

To remember you,

I re-member you –

Soldering your hands to your arms,

And your fingers to your face

So you can feel again

your own expressions,

your own blood

pulsing at the surface

like night coming down

ready to rest

and end the war.

Tell me you knew, with-

Out spring’s confirmation:

You knew in winter.

Your small fingers are

A black nail driving through me

Like night breaking day.

CREATOR, CREATION

Maria Lassnig, MoMA PS2, July 2014

This is only a piece, of the whole. Is it curious that we call works of art pieces? Pieces of something larger that without which they are not complete. As though, if only seeing one work, we cannot truly see what it is or what it means? And yet, we do. We see words, meanings, worlds.

I rather see in this piece birth. The womb extended from the body, a body in and of itself, albeit part of the mother's whole, and yet whole and separate of itself. A place where a new being becomes itself, becomes whole and then is separated... leaving mother and child once again, whole and separate. The piece you see to your left, however, is only a section of Maria Lassnig's painting. 

Here is the whole:

Maria Lassnig, MoMA PS1, July 2014

Does she hold her whole mind? Does she hold her own life? Her own mortality? Does Maria mourn, or is she reborn in herself, her ability to let die something that needs to be left behind? Swimming in the blue ocean, a chartreuse sun around her. A living, grass-green sky, feeding human and vegetable alike. Her eyes are closed.

Her body, her face, are living with brilliant color. If you did not see the exhibit, try to see it elsewhere. Her colors are alive in themselves, coursing as bright as oxygenated blood. As she got older, and you circled the galleries you saw Maria's colors grow bolder, brighter, freer. She is no longer held down by brown or cheated from her creativity with red. 

Yet, her legs are white, almost as though she left the paint to sit while we she went for a coffee and a paper. The skull sits on her lap like a baby, cradled in her hands, above and below, cradled secure against her stomach, itself wrapped by arms. White, like the legs, unfinished? or unknown?

Maria Lassnig, MoMA PS1, July 2014

This piece also feels to me- unfinished. And I love it in its hybrid sketch-painting state. I see an android painting its artist. All around the world is pulsing at a high vibration: orange and yellow and red, in a halo of reality. The negative space feels more true than both object and subject, laying in unbroken white, underlay outline, waiting for spirit to come and find them.

Creation creates creator. The art creates the artist, writes her, finds her, rebirths her, gives her new spirit. Our art turns us on ourselves, shows us not a mirror but a pool. Unlike Narcissus, we see below the reflection, to stones and sand beneath, to weaving fish, and swaying stems of water lilies that live within us, worlds unto themselves. Whole and separate and yet of us, containing whole other worlds of us. We see something, finally, in what we create, that is inaccessible from the surface. When we create, that deeper spirit has a chance to remake us, to give us a life we cannot have imagined.

As I child I found it unbelievable, unbearable that one thing I would never see was my own skull. When I write, there it is, gleaming white, its own eyes looking back at mine, something unsaid, waiting on me to say it.