Claudia Rankine

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “Cornel West makes the point...” 

Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I can­not. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.

/ 
 

You don't remember because you don't care. Some­times my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care.

/
 

Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you?

/
 

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recog­nition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this with­out breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, per­haps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new ten­dency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which trans­lates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that gov­ern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

Ishion Hutchinson

fromThe Anabasis of Godspeed

 1.

Out of a rising bank of fever grass Godspeed emerged wearing

a rubber tree leaf mask. At the beginning of the month the

strength of the battalion stood 31 officers and 1010 other

ranks. He pretended he was Baruch. “Weep not” he shouted.

“Conquer and to conquering” he shouted. “Rejoice” he shouted.

This was near or outside AXUM or ATLANTIS or those

suicide goat cliffs near HECTORS RIVER by Happy Grove

where Horace leapt and became the Great Conjunction.

Then again at Christmas the boy’s hands were high with the

murder of sorrel. At the end of the month the strength of the

battalion stood 23 officers and 921 other ranks.

3.

No. 1391 Pte. J. Fisher “C” boy died pneumonia.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

The battalion less “B” boy enchained for EL ARISH.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

No. 134 Pte. A. M. Harper “D” boy died pneumonia.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

“A” boy proceeded to No. 3 School of Military Aeronautics for

course in aviation. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

No. 6898 Pte. Benn “C” boy died malaria.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

4.

Ishion Hutchinson

Roof Nightclub

First, above all, I live forever. And
thereafter redecorate paradise
in the majesty of the Roof Nightclub,
DJ Lucifer, at predawn hours
terrifies the floorboards to give way to
Apollyon’s abyss, reflecting scarred light
on the wall. The mirror alive with tremors.

Herons bring news of consolation.
I rebuke them for my brilliance
and enrich uranium in my cove
across Navy Island. The hospital
vanishes in the fog, so I arrange rain
to restore magenta ginger lilies
where my mother walked to born me.
Malignant fireflies at Christmas;
sorrel then sorrow, such is Kingston, there
funky carols seethe asphalt with famine.

Forever ends. Never a moment holds
‘still-here,’ when sand murmurs through my fingers.
I number and chant down stars, ellipsoidal
as fire ants with, “I think I will be
killed once I die!” and again return
the Super Ape, to conquer the Roof Club,
rip off Apollyon’s hell fence; skin him; dance
thundering subatomic dub music,
until my rage yields settled coral.
A million embers of eyes split from coals
to see me loom out the shadows’ sunray
by the turntable wearing a splash crown.

Ishion Hutchinson

Requiem for Aunt May

A calm sign in the trees of May: she's dead, 
not like this dirge staining the air, her name 
recited in the camphor-house where the chalk 
figurine, that haberdashery sphinx reclines, 
riddled by the TV. There no one faces the calendar, 
river-stone talks go under the bridge of condolences, 
and land on the old sofa's shoulder. I, her water-child, 
keep watch over her laminated Savior, nailed 
into the wall, flipping a coin whose head promises 
Daedalus. Someone pries open an album, the cocoon 
postcards wail on the line, pronouncing, Aunt May— 

baker, builder of the yellow stone house, your children 
hatched wings while your face was bent in the oven. 
The mixing bowls, the wooden spoons, the plastic 
bride & groom, knew before the phone alarmed 
the night your passing. So you passed, in a floral dress, 
a shawl softly tied to your head, the house spring-cleaned. 


II 

Enters Daedalus, father, dressed in white, hands 
in pockets, strolling through prayers and smoke 
of the mourning wake. I listen: his limbs 
are pure starch! On the veranda, eyeing 
the gong-tormented sea, seaweeds streak 
his beard, salt rimmed his apologies. I hesitate 
at the labyrinth of father and son, red hurt 
throbbing my ears from my fall on the poppy grounds, 
fog swallowing all that was carried over 
years of saying nothing. Silence, this flame 
held back before erupting, as an oven after heat 
has been sucked from it. I begin in silence 
my life, then and there, as a ghost.

Ishion Hutchinson

SIBELIUS AND MARLEY

History is dismantled music; slant,
bleak on gravel. One amasses silence,
another chastises silence with nettles,
stinging ferns. I oscillate in their jaws.

The whole gut listens. The ear winces
white nights in his talons: sinking mire.
He wails and a comet impales the sky
with the duel wink of a wasp’s burning.

Music dismantles history; the flambeaux
inflame in his eyes with a locust plague,
a rough gauze bolting up his mouth unfolds,
so he lashes the air with ropes and roots

that converge on a dreadful zero,
a Golden Age. Somewhere, an old film.
Dusk solders on a cold, barren coast. There
I am a cenotaph of horns and stones.

Ishion Hutchinson

 

Station

The train station was a cemetery. 
Drunk with spirits, another being entered. 
I fanned gnats from my eyes to see into his face. 
I saw father. I looked and shouted, "Father!" 
He did not budge, after thirteen years, neither snow nor train, 
only a few letters, and twice on a cell 
his hoar frost accent crossed the Atlantic. 
I poked his face, his mask slipped as a moment 
in childhood, a gesture of smoke, pure departure.  

Along freighted crowds the city punished, 
I picked faces in the thick nest of morning's 
hard light, they struck raw and stupid, 
and in the dribble of night commuters, 
phantoms, I have never found him. From the almond 
trees' shadows I have looked, since a virus 
disheartened the palms' blossoms and mother  
shaved her head to a nut, gave me the sheaves 
in her purse so he would remember her. 

I was talking fast of her in one of my Cerberus 
voices but he laughed shaking the scales 
of froth on his coat. The station's cold cracked 
back a hysterical congregation, echo and plunder, 
his eyes flashed little obelisks that chased 
the spirits out, and without them, wavering, 
I saw nothing like me. Stranger, father, cackling 
rat, I stood transfixed at the bottom of the station. 
Who was I? Pure echo in the train's beam 

arriving on its cold nerve of iron. Grave, 
exact, the doors breathed open. Father was nowhere 
when I boarded and looked through the glass 
and plunged cold down the shadow chamber 
many wore many strong disguises and none 
spoke or even looked I was there in the box, 
incandescent, becoming half their hush, 
half still in the man's chiseling snarl, louder 
now he was away and I am departing.

Ishion Hutchinson

Homage:Vallejo

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners

of second life the hospital light ravened solstice

blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,

the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.

After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,

the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,

rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurried

up Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone

in the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, falling

at noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street.

Ishion Hutchinson

“At nights birds hammered my unborn”

At nights birds hammered my unborn

child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing

bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone

among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,

into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.

Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.