rabearivello hovers amongst the branches

  & sings his mournful dirge of mystery

  while children crawl out without legs

  towards a sea that has no motion

  that is washed red by the ink

  of the sky

  that is filled by a poet’s

  eye always capsizing

  * Jean-Joseph Rabearivello (1901–1937) was one of the most remarkable poets of the 20th century. A Madagascarian poet, he was completely original in the last half of his life. He always seemed to write in a dream-like trance, conjuring up remarkable cosmic images, totally contradictory, impossible to believe images. He has been called a pure African/surreal poet. He wrote in French. He died, a suicide, in 1937, in Madagascar.

  DREAM POEM/SONG

  silence, silence on the roads

  blending with wind/song

  that is also silent

  silent are words though spoken

  with microphones amplified through anger,

  with flames, silent the sound of four-

  string guitars played by sightless donkeys

  in the road, in the middle of the road

  blind donkeys sit playing

  silent four-string guitars,

  & silent are the stampeding herds

  of butchered headless elephants,

  silent the bear trapped raging

  in steel-fanged trappers grip,

  though the blood gushes out washing the pear

  fallen from branches, the earth beneath

  receives no storm released blood/drops

  that are tears for a grave

  of darkness no longer hearing music

  not even nature’s woodwinds/Coltrane

  amongst branches singing love

  drowned out by lynch mobs,

  though the blood gushes out washing the pear

  though the blood gushes out washing the pear

  in the streets where an empty junk wagon

  with rickety wheels of hunger

  rattles soundlessly over cobblestone bricks

  the blood stains the wheels stains the pear

  bleeding over bells pleading of plunder

  soundless the squeals of cancerous hunger

  of sin sane voices, silent the proclamations,

  theories, revolutionary buttons

  replacing substance with rattling voices

  of silence, the total noise of absurdity

  of hatred-filling the air with their silence,

  silence on the roads filled with blood & corpses

  silence blending with wind/song, wheeling

  across centuries that are also silent

  bleeding silences within silences

  bleeding silences within silences

  though the blood gushes out staining the pear

  in the road, in the middle of the road

  blind donkeys sit playing

  silent four-string guitars,

  & silent the stampeding herds of butchered

  headless elephants, silent the rage of the bear

  RAIN / TIME

  In a hurricane of dust morning

  this man jumped sideways out of a dream

  dressed in black,

  jumped right out of his own bleeding thumb,

  and standing wide-legged in the middle

  of the bone road,

  in the middle of a corpse crowded road,

  drew a gun that shot out fast

  from a fast drooping barrel of flesh,

  that reminded me of an old military man’s penis

  after this daily hecatombs

  and after everytime he thinks about

  sex shot out

  from the eye of that drooping black barrel,

  sleeping gristle,

  where the moon crawls into hide

  everytime the sun bursts spitting down

  its lasered sword/shafts of death,

  on the deserts at high noon in the fire-time,

  shot out into cloud of bleached bone

  fang-night

  slashing rain-time

  in needle rain-time,

  a song decree slithering

  from fast-drooping black barrel

  transformed into hurricane

  of dust morning

  like a wild-eyed cobra trying to escape

  from a red-eyed purple mongoose

  who leapt out from a yellow cough

  of limping smoke

  weeping from the eye

  of that invisible cold barrel,

  leapt out into the rain-time

  dressed in black

  serious as a final heart-attack

  serious, dead serious as cancer

  DREAM / DANCE

  seven wingless syllables, dance

  peal across blues of chanting rivers

  swim within cathedrals grown from bones

  huckabuck across electric circus tables

  synchronized to unchanging faces of stone

  fourteen perfect anachronisms

  creep within the bleeding dome of the soul

  plunge towards the black/dead face of the sun

  eclipsed by a solo of the Bird

  eleven soundless syllables wrapped in stone

  & dead from overliving, chant of silence

  weeping red tears within the temperate zone

  between silence, obvious death

  thirteen perfect deaths cylindrically

  symmetrical hang from fifty bleeding

  money trees in Washington

  & thirteen perfect deaths dance in stone

  unknown/thirteen soundless syllables

  wrapped in stone dream/dance

  BIRDS FLY WITHOUT MOTION TO THE SUMMIT

  when air freezes into heat

  birds fly without motion to the summit

  when the flag of despair is planted

  death rushes headlong into the blood,

  and time rolls, like a tide backwards

  the hours run slipping on banana peels

  and skeletons rattle night-seeking flesh

  where the dead masquerade as the living

  the eyes seek heights of the sightless

  where birds fly without motion to the summit

  the air dressed like a clown freezes into night

  BENEATH THE BLUEST SEA

  birds flap crumbling wings

  beneath tailfire of metal hawks

  distance deepens

  as the last deep breath

  of the fish-man swimming within the falling

  dark void

  slips away; as

  flesh falls away from

  bone, as time drops blood

  into inkwells

  death filled with piranhas & sharks.

  all around,

  the earth grows cities

  upon mountainous sinking brows of edges.

  here,

  people sink into themselves;

  within hours/steps

  flesh hangs loose from bones.

  from

  SNAKE BACK SOLOS

  Selected Poems 1969–1977

  ASH DOORS & JUJU GUITARS

  we have come through doors flaming

  ashes the sad written legacy

  smoldering bones heaped in pyres behind us

  & yet campfire blues people singing

  softly still under blue-black moonlight

  ash doors & juju guitars conjurin’ ancestral flights

  sweet memories of shaman juju men

  cotton-eyed bands, croonin’

  softly the guitar-woman stroked enjoins

  blues chanting mantras across throbbing land

  at the flight of sun  light

  at the flight of sun  light

  I.

  UP SUN, SOUTH OF ALASKA: A SHORT AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY SONG

  for my son, Quincy Brandon Troupe

  1.

  slit balls hung in southern/american winds then

  when drumheads were slit made mum by rum

  & songs hung way down

  around our ankles bleeding up sun south of alaska

  swinging silhouettes picked clean to bone

  by black crows

  caw caws razor scars black-winged crows ripping

  sunset flights of slashing razors

  crows crows

  blues caw caws & moans

  & blues caw caws & moans

  then sunsets dangled voices

  crowing blues caw caws black crowing razors streak

  silhouettes against a frying skillet

  broken necks & sun-gored bodies blistered in eclipse

  hung nails rope burned

  into sweet black lives

  rip of pendulum razors

  lays open the quaking earth of flesh/moans

  from blue-black dues paying women

  dropping embryos into quicksand

  african secret songs strapped across blood-stained blades

  of glittering american razors

  songs of sun/down flesh karintha dusk flesh

  drug through spit/ripped

  bleeding up sun,south of alaska

  bleeding up sun south of Alaska

  2.

  & crows & razors & ropes & bullets

  crows & razors & ropes & bullets

  the shared cold legacy

  & crazed pale men, lassoing the sun out of the sky

  & darkness then bleeding up sun south of alaska

  crow wings covering the sky & our eyes & their eyes too

  eclipsing the face of the sun

  now an invisible clock with laser-beamed hands

  that are branding rays burning our flesh

  reduced over time to bone/dust

  kissing stone but the nature of stone

  is not moved by the tongue of heat entering

  the mouth of our lives—passionate sweet touch of meaning

  but still we move through space towards grace

  carrying a sphinx in one eye

  a guitar in the other knowing that time is always

  in the possession of the keeper

  3.

  so now son black

  roll the pages of your american eyes back son

  black son back roll them back black son american

  son, way way back son

  back before the sun ripped your flesh here

  way way back sun

  for the pages of your eyes carry the memory son

  they are blue-black pages dues pages fingers strumming

  music of oral history songs griot songs

  african songs

  strong black strumming fingers son

  american black lives as humming caw caws

  black crows transformed into eagles

  no matter ripping suns son

  no matter slit drums/tongues

  we are here son

  are sun music spirit son

  caw caw blues razors

  keepers of secret guitars

  THESE CROSSINGS, THESE WORDS

  for Pablo Neruda

  where will they take us to

  these crossings

  over rivers of blood-stained words

  syllables haphazardly thrown together

  as marriages that fall apart

  in one day

  we have come this far in space

  to know nothing of time

  of the imprisoning distance travelled

  the scab-fleshed hobos passed

  we have most times asked nothing

  of the mirrors of our own shattered reflections

  passing as lava smoldering in the streets

  in our eyes the guillotine

  smile of the hangman

  a time-bomb ticking for our hearts

  the brain an item bought like so much gooey candy

  the laugh a razor’s flash

  the party time juba

  of My Lai’s sickening ritual

  as american as elvis presley’s dead days

  & the blood-scarred wind

  whipped rag blue squared off with stars

  that are silver bullets

  & pin-striped with bones of mythologized peppermint

  will not hide the corpse-lynched history

  hanging there twisting slowly

  as a black man’s body

  screaming through soft magnolia air

  over a tear-stained bride’s veil

  breeze blown & fluttering

  as a flopping fish

  in a gesture of surrender

  we have come all this distance in darkness

  bomb-flashes guiding our way

  speaking of love/of passions instantly eclipsed

  to find this corpse of freedom hung & machine-gunned

  for the blood of a name beneath a simple word

  (& what do we know who have not gone there in truth

  of the roots of these flames burning at river-crossings

  of the crossbones of our names connecting rivers

  of blood beautiful as a fusing coltrane solo?)

  & there are times when we see

  celluloid phantoms of mediarized lovers

  crawling from sockets of cracking up skeletons

  posing as cameras & t.v. screens

  times still when we stand here

  anchored to silence by terror

  of our own voice & of the face revealed

  in the unclean mirror shattering

  our sad-faced, children

  dragging anchors of this gluttonous

  debauchery & of this madness

  that continues to last

  NEW YORK CITY BEGGAR

  his body held the continence

  of a protruding tongue

  of a hanged man twisting & turning

  in sweltering, needle-sharp heat

  held the continence

  of a jet plane’s high propulsion saliva

  his body swollen tight as a toilet stool

  packed full of two-day-old shit

  warts crawling like frenzied roaches

  over his skin of yellow fever

  the texture of quivering pus

  bloated as the graves of earth

  or jammed as rivers full

  of lynched black bodies—

  sores popping open through ventilated

  clothing like hungry termites

  devouring flesh

  the texture of quivering pus

  & he looked at me

  with the look of a wrung-necked chicken

  with that of a somnambulist

  blasted, by poison of thunderbird wine

  storms his eyes streaked red

  with crow-wings raking corners

  of his peppermint moons

  like claws of a rooster

  & his fingernails, the color of tadpoles

  sought the origin of a 400-year-old itch

  which held the history

  & secret of crushed indian bones

  & of clamoring, moaning voices

  of unborn black children who were

  screaming semen of castrated nigga dicks

  & his look held the origin of ashes

  the blood-stained legacy of sawdust on the floor

  of a butcher

  & his rasping sawblade voice cutting

  held the unmistakable calligraphy of lepers

  who with elephantiasis feet drag themselves across

  sword blades of murderous pentagon juntas

  (which is the history of reared-back cobra snakes

  which is the truth of the cold game we’re in)

  & when he spoke to me

  his maggot-swarming words reeking of outhouses

  “brother, can you spare a dime?”

  his spirit low as coal dust

  his energy drained as transparent shells

  of sunstricken roaches his breath

  smelling of rotten fish markets

  his teeth looking like chipped tombstones

  nicked away in a hurricane of razors

  eye heard a fork-tongued capitalist

  on wall street, fart & croak

  ( which is the history of reared-back king cobras

  which is the truth of the game we’re in)

  & when eye walked away with my dime

  still chattering in my pocket

  he put a halloween leer on me & said “thank you

  boss”gave the V for victory/peace sign

  cursed under his breath

  & left, like an apparition flapping

  his raggedy black coat

  like giant crow wings in the wind

  AFTER HEARING A RADIO ANNOUNCEMENT: A COMMENT ON SOME CONDITIONS: 1978

  yesterday in new york city

  the gravediggers went on strike

  & today the undertakers went on strike

  because they said of the overwhelming

  amount of corpses

  (unnecessarily they said, because

  of wars & stupid killings in the streets

  & etcetera & etcetera)

  sweating up the world   corpses

  propped up straight in living room chairs

  clogging up rivers, jamming up freeways

  stopping up elevators   in the gutters   corpses

  everywhere you turn

  & the undertakers said they were

  being overworked with all this goddamned killing

  going on   said they couldn’t even enjoy

  all the money they was making

  said that this shit has got to stop

  & today eye just heard, on the radio, that

  the coffin-makers are waiting, in the wings

  for their chance to do the same thing

  & tomorrow & if things keep going this way

  eye expect to hear of the corpses

  themselves boycotting death

  until things get better

  or at least getting themselves

  together in some sort of union espousing

  self-determination

  for better funerals &

  burial conditions

  or something extraordinarily

  heavy like that

  STEEL POLES GIVE BACK NO SWEAT

  after Waring Cuney

  in new york city people

  cop their own posts

  underground waiting on subway platforms

  lean up against them

  claim them as their own

  ground & space

  while up over ground

  winds scrape the back of skies piercing

  poles of concrete laced with laughing quicksilver

  mirrors square phallic symbols

  in their glint

  of limp-dick capitalism