Emmet Till

Your eyes were a sea conch in which the heady battle

of your fifteen year old blood sparkled.
Even young they never had any age,
or rather more than all the skyscrapers
five centuries of torturers
of witch burners weighed on them,
five centuries of cheap gin of big cigars
of fat bellies filled with slices of rancid bibles
a five century mouth bitter with dowager sins,
they were five centuries old EMMETT TILL,
five centuries is the ageless age of Cains stake.
EMMETT TILL I say:
in the heart zero,
of blood not a drop,
and as for yours may it hide my Sun, may it mix with my bread:
Hey Chicago Boy
is it still true that youre worth
as much as a white man?"
Spring, he believed in you. Even at the edge of night,
at the edge of the MISSISSIPPI rolling its bars, its barriers,
its tomb-like avalanches between the high banks of racial hatred.
In spring rushing its murmurs into the portholes of eyes.
In spring hound-calling the bovine panic in the savannas of the blood.
In spring slipping the gloves from its fine hands in a burst of shells and
siliquae,
loosener of fear clots, dissolver of the clots of hatred
swollen with age and in the flow of blood streams carrying
the hazardous rubric of stalked beasts.
But They
they were invulnerable, sluggish as they were,
and mounted, massively, on bizarre immemorial billygoats
CHICAGO BOY" . . .

All gone with the bleating of the racial wind

He listens in the blue bush of veins
to the steady singing of the blood bird,
he anticipates above the banks of sleep
Sun, the rise of your furtive step,
a vehement fish, in the astonishing blue field.

Then night remembered its arm

a vampires flabby flight suddenly hovering
and BIG MILLAMS Colt 45
wrote the verdict and the state of the Union in rust letters on the living black
wall:

20 years of zinc
15 years of copper
15 years of oil

and the 180th year of these states

but in the heart unfeeling clockwork
what, nothing, zero
of blood not a drop
in the white hearts tough antiseptic meat?
To the Serpent

I have had occasion in the bewilderment of cities to search for the right animal to adore. So I
worked my way back to the first times. Undoing cycles untying knots crushing plots removing
covers killing hostages I searched.
Ferret. Tapir. Uprooter.
Where where where the animal who warned me of floods
Where where where the bird who led me to honey
Where where where the bird who revealed to me the fountainheads
the memory of great alliances betrayed great friendships lost through our fault exalted me
Where where where
Where where where
The word made vulgar to me
O serpent sumptuous back do you enclose in your sinuous lash the powerful soul of my
grandfather?
Greetings to you serpent through whom morning shakes its beautiful mango mauve December
chevelure and for whom the milk-invented night tumbles its luminous mice down its wall
Greetings to you serpent grooved like the bottom of the sea and which my heart truly unbinds for
us like the premise of the deluge
Greetings to you serpent your reputation is more majestic than their gait and the peace their God
gives not you hold supremely.

Serpent delirium and peace

over the hurdles of a scurrilous wind the countryside dismembers for me secrets whose steps
resounded at the outlet of the millenary trap of gorges that they tightened to strangulation.

to the trashcan! may they all rot in portraying the banner of a black crow weakening in a beating
of white wings.
Serpent
broad and royal disgust overpowering the return in the sands of deception
spindrift nourishing the vain raft of the seagull
in the pale tempest of reassuring silences you the least frail warm yourself
You bathe yourself this side of the most discordant cries on the dreamy spumes of grass
when fire is exhaled from the widow boat that consumes the cape of the echos flash
just to make your successive deaths shiver all the moregreen frequenting of the elements
your threat.

Your threat yes your threat body issuant from the raucous haze of bitterness where it corrupted
the concerned lighthouse keeper and that whistling takes its little gallop time toward the assassin
rays of discovery.

Serpent
charming biter of womens breasts and through whom death steals into the maturity in the depths
of a fruit sole lord lord alone whose multiple image places on the strangler figs altar the offering
of a chevelure that is an octopodal threat a sagacious hand that does not pardon cowards
Corps Perdu

I who Krakatoa
I who everthing better than a monsoon
I who open shest
I who Laelaps
I who bleat better than a cloaca
I who outside the musical scale
I who Zambezi or frantic or rhombos or cannibal
I would like to be more and more humble and more lowly
always more serious without vertigo or vestige
to the point of losing myself falling
into the live semolina of a well-opened earth
Outside in lieu of atmosphere there'd be a beautiful haze no dirt in it
each drop of water forming a sun there
whose name the same for all things
would be DELICIOUS TOTAL ENCOUNTER
so that one would no longer know what goes by
-a star or a hope
or a petal from the flamboyant tree
or an underwater retreat
raced across by the flaming torches of aurelian jellyfish
Then I imagine life would flood my whole being
better still I would feel it touching me or biting me
lying down I would see the finally free odors come to me
like merciful hands
finding their way
to sway their long hair in me
longer than this past that I cannot reach.
Things stand back make room among you
room for my repose carrying in waves
my frightening crest of anchor-like roots
looking for a place to take hold
Things I probe I probe
me the street-porter I am root-porter
and I bear down and I force and I arcane
I omphale
Ah who leads me back toward the harpoons
I am very weak
I hiss yes I hiss very ancient things
I whoa lie down wind
and against my unstable and fresh muzzle
against my eroded face
press you cold face of ravaged laughter
The wind alas I will continue to hear it
nigger nigger nigger from the depths
of the timeless sky
a little less loud than today
but still too loud
and this crazed howling of dogs and horses
which it thrusts at our forever fugitive heels
but I in turn in the air
shall rise a scream so violent
that I shall splatter the whole sky
and with my branches torn to shreds
and with the insolent jet of my wounded and solemn bole

I shall command the islands to be

Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith.