hurricane & you wonder how it all came to this

  from this small, dainty, high-class looking

  proper woman with the ballerina style,

  who just a heart-beat moment ago was flashing you

  a soft, bright smile wide as daybreak, her laughter

  spraying light sparkling bliss all over you,

  made you think it was music entering your space

  made you think it was light in this place

  LUCILLE

  for Lucille Clifton

  if you were a guitar, lucille,

  b.b. king would play beautiful blues

  songs all over your ample spirit,

  but you’re a poet, sister,

  so you play your own wondrous riffs

  through notes of your honed words,

  they dig down deep, sewn within

  your music, boned, you keep them inside

  your brief luminous sentences of echoes,

  sounding like sonorous utterings

  flight seeking light inside a flute’s breath,

  bird wings lifting on the wind’s

  rustling flight, your elliptic absences

  pregnant with caesuras arrest us with their sorrow—

  winged loves gone too fast from you now

  always test the elixir of your rooted

  deep faith, everywhere in your poetry

  the conviction of living spirits, beauty

  shining through the bravery of your life is

  a bright, flashing beacon pulsating harmony

  in all this darkness, your embrace

  warm as the sun during summer,

  it is your faith that holds me fast to you

  now, inside your sweet nourishing well of love

  eye know there is a “river between us”

  we can always cross over, we can,

  cross over it again & again & again,

  can always cross over it with faith,

  can always cross over it with love,

  again & again & again,

  like you do, lucille, like you do

  THE SHOT

  for Tiger Woods, at the 2005 Masters

  we watched him loft a chip shot from the rough

  on the 16th, the ball dropped from the sky

  like an aspirin in the middle of the green,

  then we saw it move right like pure magic,

  like a basketball player pivoting

  before making a deft move to the hole,

  this spinning little white ball made a beeline

  in the direction of the cup,

  crawling over the green it had twenty-twenty vision,

  everyone watched, held their breaths,

  when it got to the lip of the cup it lingered,

  trembled at the edge like it was afraid of heights,

  before dropping like a ball of sugar

  into a cup of black coffee,

  then the crowd erupted as he kneeled,

  then stood, ramming his balled fist into the sky,

  celebrating having being blessed by a miracle

  cameras caught him in his signature logo

  & everyone knew then the rest was pure glory

  FOR RICHARD PRYOR: 1940-2005

  you danced on wing tips of raunchy humor, richard,

  danced on edges of words flying high up in the blue(s),

  you were the flight of so many birds soaring

  toward freedom of expression, an idea clued you

  in your in-the-pocket profane language, words mirroring

  the jazzy tongue-lashing put-downs we blacks heard all

  our screaming lives laughed out in barbershops, churches,

  in beauty parlors, on street corners where gun-slinging local

  black wordsmiths slapped down cruel, embarrassing all-comers

  with their oral boasting toasts, so funny they leaned into caustic

  hard verbal shootouts everyday, sardonically hip they thrived

  on cutting down to size all pretenders to their thrones

  though none were even close to the genius you were in stand-up,

  richard, you were the cat’s meow, the man who had the gift

  the quickest razor-tongue flashing under any & every sun

  & everybody knew not to raise up & bother with your “dirty” words

  words slicing clean to the bone in head-on comedic cutting sessions

  & eye loved you when eye first heard you dishing it out on tv,

  on records, you made everyone’s hair stand up straight

  with your machete-wielding stories rooted in peoria

  eye knew you were the real deal throwing down our words

  on stage, our african-american prometheus, fragile as you were

  you had steel in your backbone, steel in your everyday

  commitment to truth, flawed as you were too with drugs

  so high you set yourself on fire, lived to tell about it

  lived to laugh at the stupidity of yourself in self-deprecating

  screaming routines, filled with truth, sadness, & hilarity

  you are always with me, richard, & eye will judge

  other comedians, how their words stand up next to yours

  V.

  CONNECTIONS

  for Robert Antoni

  1.

  on a drop-dead clear day you took me down the waterway,

  riding the miami river in your small motor boat, robert,

  the skyline of miami back-dropping or journey,

  like on miami vice,

  suddenly I was looking for a flock of pink flamingos skimming

  low over biscayne’s waves to burst into view, take over

  the scene, alongside don johnson & michael phillip thomas

  streaking by, squeezed into a wave-skipping cigarette boat,

  front-end up, chasing drug-dealing “bad guys,”

  but the scene was so tranquil here as boats slid through oily,

  dark, smelly, flotsam-filled waters on this november day,

  so different from the sparkling blue, pastel images

  surfeiting miami vice on celluloid,

  with staccato with gunfire blending with colors,

  complete with rhythmic soundtracks& stunningly beautiful people

  fused with all matter of races, dressed in linen,

  wondrous bodies of women bursting from skimpy bikinis,

    none of this was present this day, though the sky was

  lovely as any eye have ever witnessed,

  the mood—except for our laughter—was pensive

  as we passed the venetian islands & san marco island

  (where you used to live before barcelona, spain, robert, new york

  city), silent now, except for the sound of wet fish slapping

  & flopping around metal pails after fishermen hauled them in

  over concrete railings of the venetian causeway,

  running low past islands of the same name,

  spanning biscayne bay,

  connecting miami beach to miami

  & beyond here, out to the east the atlantic stretches,

  its foaming waves to touch the caribbean,

  latin america, africa & europe,

  all these places blended inside you here, robert, where

  your genes fuse genomes of all the modern world, your dna

  pumped through veins & arteries bright red

  as your two-year old son gabriel’s vexed face, screaming now,

  at the top of his lungs, his innocent displeasure real,

  contorts his beautiful face with roped veins

  bulging from his temple & neck, his voice catching,

  coughing, until you give him a drink,

  then his transformation to calm is swift,

  remarkable even, in the way his eyes laugh

  with glee, now, as rubber car wheels squeal above us

  over the causeway like scherzos, our laughter breaking,

  skedaddling, shimmying through the air like skeins of yarn

  sky-diving from our mouths in musical notes

  & we, too, robert, are like children, here in this world,

  our blood fused within the nexus of history,

  flowing within interconnecting musical tongues,

  moving us—like this soiled river we are riding over now

  is moving us—toward some secret rendezvous

  we will discover later on when we get there

  2.

  what is the real meaning of any journey, mental surfing

  through connections of our minds made real when we see

  at the end a possibility for redemption,

  brought to life by what our eyes pick up along the way, we keep

  information vital as blood plumped through the veins, is sacred

  as heartbeats drumming through language as life-force,

  glue, a synergy, perhaps, of oppositional music,

  caught within the ebb & flow of sounds that each hears,

  inside the moment, is close enough, as well, to rhythm, waterloo,

  is beautiful enough to go there with ears & eyes wide open, too,

  as to stand buffeted by a hurricane wind & crow,

  “no wind exists anywhere like this but here,” but how

  would they know, having been nowhere else but here?

  3.

  nomenclatures of miasmas are sweeping the world,

  oxygenating, they become looming specters of prophecy,

  synergistic connections to the past,

  if we pay attention to what connects us all, robert,

  we might more easily move towards a real state of beauty

  move into a more blessed state of grace

  IN SAINTE-ANNE, GUADELOUPE

  for Jacque-Marie Basses and Derek Walcott

  we awake to days in august bright with emerald

  foliage shimmering around us,

    as if we were living in a lost paradise

  somewhere, abundant with wild hummingbirds darting

  through extravagant leaves, as orange flamboyance peek,

  red hibiscus flowers dance high among the leaves,

  as shining palm fronds wave like warrior sword blades

  lance through lush, whispering air heavy with heat,

  sticky, even in the shade,

    as the ocean’s murmuring bric-a-brac

  is a low, constant reminder in the distance,

  foaming to shore wave after wave terracing in,

  one after the other, evokes memories of white pages

  being licked open by wind tonguing a book

  left in the salt wash (it reminds me of history,

  its far-flung journeys piling up here as sand wedge now

  between my toes, next to the webbed imprints of birds,

  the zigzagging trail of lizards wriggling through

  the hieroglyphic ambrosia of amphibious ambivalence,

  soaked in amber), just before the whispering goes

  still, then, just as quickly, a fresh new breeze startles

  with its coolness, licks a soothing tongue

  wet across my sweating forehead,

  blesses open my eyelids, weighed down now,

  with a gathering languor so heavy eye find myself drifting,

  as in a dream, toward sleep,

  nodding a herky-jerky head dance, imitating a junkie’s,

  so pronounced at times my noggin reminds of a cork

  bobbing above a fisherman’s line & hook,

  after a hungry fish has bitten

  & the struggle for survival is on,

  eye linger here for a moment, think of the breadfruit

  leaves waving in benediction after the wind’s blustering

  command, rustling groves of mangoes & strawberries

  just off the black snake of a road twisting into bouliqui

  from sainte-anne, in central guadeloupe

  & there, in bouliqui, the hibiscus are pink

  buds imitating pursed lips waiting for a kiss,

  while above birds lance close heavy air, plunge through amber

  filigreed light between the lattice-drop of leaves

  as the sun passes behind & over the treetops,

  starting its daily descent toward a frigid pacific

  a sudden wet breeze startlesmy dreams with its here-

  then-gone sweet tongue of my wife’s sool breathing,

  then, back in sainte-anne, wrrnchd out of my dreams

  eye watch dragonflies swim the air

  sweating toward twilight, while white butterflies wobble

  & float like tiny sacred ghosts between the scarlet, yellow

  flamboyance, the emerald leaves holding the hibiscus’s

  red lips, deep within our own paradise here,

  at auberge le grande large,

  among the lengthening shadows, palm fronds waving

  like servants above a giant frog, who seems to be leading

  a deafening choir of other toads in a symphonic offering,

  eye listen in awe as nature’s orchestra boggles my senses

  once more with its beautiful perfect pitch & rhythm

  A WOMAN IN THE WATER

  eye see a woman in the caribbean sea—

  water off the beach of sainte-anne,

  she is walking with curlers in her nappy hair,

  a pink net, a straw hat on top like a crown,

  she is black, walking through the sea,

  the sun is high in the vaulting blue,

  she is humming a beautiful tune,

  the sea is clear light green to its sandy bottom,

  as some cats’ eyes are green, some striking women,

  the water is warm as a freshly drawn bath,

  the woman’s tune is so beautiful

  eye want to know the meaning

  under the words married to the rhythm

  there, inside the song, a feeling of joy

  eye hear in her deep voice walking

  through the sea there, wearing a red dress,

  the water is warm & clear & light green

  as a cat’s eye, those of a striking woman,

  all the way down to their sandy bottom

  A KITE ABOVE THE BEACH

  coconut leaves shiver, wave, dance, green-golden, stream

  like manes of flaxen hair behind galloping racehorses,

  high above auberge le grande large, in sainte-anne,

  pulsating voices of croaking frogs, buzzing crickets swell below

  the gathering darkness, yeasts like bread, just before night falls,

  raises a winking, full moon—a one-eyed cat’s view—

  a cyclops looking at the world, just before lights click on,

  headlamps of cars pop bright into view, before twin lanterns

  guiding two watchmen on their rounds, a lone, fragile kite trailing

  a snaking train of trembling ribbons, flutters skyward, a speckle

  above the beach, a hint of uncertainty there, like a young bird

  searching for its mother before climbing upward toward curiosity,

  riding a lifting alizé might climb further than perhaps

  its mother taught it to fly, now its ascent hints a fretful hesitation

  just being up there, higher than it’s ever gone before, suddenly

  a gut-wrenching fear of the unknown seems to consume it,

  like a beginning swimmer being pulled farther & farther out to sea,

  right before a freezing panic sets in, grips him, like now, like this

  young bird, this fragile, drifting kite fluttering ever upward

  before darkness swallows them with its daunting black magic,

  here full of sounds, sea waves washing in hissing & foaming,

  voices of people, frogs, & crickets fusing their orchestral miracle

  & a full moon up there, in the night sky, staring like a cyclops—

  a one-eyed black cat looking down on all this teeming planet

  THE MOON IS A LEMON WEDGE

  the moon is a lemon wedge over guadeloupe

  in the night sky, its likeness swims bold

  inside a cold, tall glass of rum & coke

  standing on a table, on a white veranda wrapped

  around an airy home somewhere around high noon,

  on a bright, clear day, somewhere in sainte-anne,

  as flamboyance bloom orange, high up,

  or low-down in shimmering, lush green leaves,

  beneath the sun’s wicked eye, in a blue sky paraded by clouds

  soft as cotton candy riding over forms of swimmers in emerald

  warm caribbean waters, but you are not there

  except in your poetic imagination, but here, under this

  starlit sky, right now, in all this blooming darkness,

  driving the back roads of grande terre, on a clear night

  & looming the moon is a lemon wedge suspended

  above you, a still life in an artist’s paint-splattered room,

  a beacon wedge lodged inside a lover’s dreaming bloom,

  a milky-blind eye of ray charles, or stevie wonder

  SOMETIMES IN MONTEBELLO

  rain storms come swooping in wearing veils of dancing

  mist, come whooshing in over guadeloupe with a switching,

  swishing motion of women’s skirts when they swing

  their wondrous hips, as probing tongues of scandalous winds,

  who, if truth be told, are nothing more than peeping gigolos

  prancing around, lifting dresses of women with the sweet,

  whispering sounds of their breezy tongues, they are lyrical,

  these winds, fleet, sometimes, soft as scented talcum

  caressing skin with soothing touches, these rains

  murmuring secret lullabies rustling through leaves,

  bending tips of grass with fingers curling softly around

  them as if they were follicles of a lover’s hair,

  eye watch veils of rain wash over the green body

  of a lizard as it darts through luminous grass quick as fear

  when it drops down on you & you run lickety-split

  into the unknown, suddenly eye become the lizard

  running for cover when lightning strikes,

  zigzags across a sky gone black as miles davis’s skin,

  his smile a sliver of moon in the distance where clouds break,

  the sea murmuring secrets beneath them now

  are foaming waves of histories fish know but will not tell us