Major Jackson

The Flag of Imagination Furled

Because we held hands I never prophesied
the tenants of cemeteries nor found time 
to solve the great riddles in the narrow 
corridors of all my cities. What overcame me, all that 
running my forefinger down the wintry pages 
of my masters and my adversaries, touching 
their sentences like sculptured palaces,
touring their villages of ink? I’m sure most of the time,
Nina Simone was there and helped to deepen 
the pouches beneath my eyes even in gleeful Madrid,
preaching to a cloistered community of garlic cloves 
or spray-painting morning fog, making sure 
not to get too dizzy from the lash of geraniums 
lest they launch me into a spell of lyric wonder. 
Severe sadness? A cocoon of oppression? Nothing accounts 
for my frozen laughter in the proud cantinas, 
my meticulous lack of holy clamor as I scribbled 
toward some infinitude. How often I’ve wanted to 
lick my mirrors and pose questions to my footsteps,
of course without the crisis of caves or politicians 
eating hungrily from their dark bowls of pocket watches.