Carl Phillips

 

Passing

When the Famous Black Poet speaks, 
I understand 

that his is the same unnervingly slow 
rambling method of getting from A to B 
that I hated in my father, 
my father who always told me 
don't shuffle. 

The Famous Black Poet is 
speaking of the dark river in the mind 
that runs thick with the heroes of color, 
Jackie R., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone 
who knew how to sing or when to run. 
I think of my grandmother, said 
to have dropped dead from the evil eye, 
of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and 
a generally difficult future headed her way 
in the still water 
of her brother's commode. 
I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans, 
and I want to tell the poet that the blues 
is not my name, that Alabama 
is something I cannot use 
in my business. 

He is so like my father, 
I don't ask the Famous Black Poet, 
afterwards, 
to remove his shoes, 
knowing the inexplicable black 
and pink I will find there, a cut 
gone wrong in five places. 
I don't ask him to remove 
his pants, since that too 
is known, what has never known 
a blade, all the spaces between, 
where we differ ... 

I have spent years tugging 
between my legs, 
and proved nothing, really. 
I wake to the sheets I kicked aside, 
and examine where they've failed to mend 
their own creases, resembling some silken 
obstruction, something pulled 
from my father's chest, a bad heart, 
a lung, 

the lung of the Famous Black Poet 
saying nothing I want to understand.