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Communion, and: The Pine-Tree Sweetens My Body, and: I'll Take You to Africa

2009; Saint Louis University; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/afa.0.0037

1945-6182

Cyrus Cassells,

American and British Literature Analysis

Communion, and: The Pine-Tree Sweetens My Body, and: I'll Take You to Africa Cyrus Cassells (bio) Communion A revering pitcher of milkpoured on a slave's cool resting-place(even a ghost needs sustenance),an artful Sea Island slave christened Jupiterwho festooned his banjo with crude, blue,cantering horses, a blinded slave who lived to savorunbossed days. My chains fell away:that dream. My chains fell awaywith a Juneteenth glory. * In the midst of bondage,ingenuity, a deepdown plenty;in the midst of plenty, a gloriousself-forgetfulness: time spent with the bold-horsed,at-the-ready banjo seemed heaven time—replenishing, redeeming, warming himas thoroughly as hoe-cakes and the homeplace blueof supper fires; likewise, in Carolina, a wholedog day morning could be occupied [End Page 79] with the brusque weddingof a disheveled wheelbarrow and the windblown applesfrom my grandfather's hardy trees. * Ghostyhead,move-along man, what is this night cousin to,this lowcountry night? The onerous passage:the well-deep dark of the hold, the not-gutted baritonecrying and singing— eoho, eoho—of the man chained next to you— as if God's Eden-intact fruitwere forever out of reach, as if solace and dayclean,1have mercy, were impossible: dark of the holdthick as blackstrap syrup. * Nevertheless, dayclean comes,enlivening, bold as a posse, with its bufferof buttered cornbread, of bracing coffee cooledjust-so in a china saucer, and hurried back to the cup(my Grandfather Frank's habit)— Sustenance:a shrimp-and-grits pipe dream, then the real plate, oh my,the real communion.* As if we could be fed,washed clean, and crowned with bride-soft shore birds(that dream), all of our deep-stored wisheswaterborne, all of our derided people'smyriad night terrors hushed at last—whip-scars,tears, and chimeras [End Page 80] of the slave-holding pastdissolved in dayclean's pennant-clearpromise of resurrection.* On days of upending hunger,breakspirit days, able wrought-iron makers, able watermendefer their dreams— heart, make roomfor the blinded ghosts, for the breadline men, make roomfor the windfall apples. The Pine-Tree Sweetens My Body As pine needles coalescewith bulrush and sweetgrass to shore a cherishedSea Island basket, so it seems, the fortifying,peace-granting pines have been nonchalantlywoven into my days. Out of childhood, they appear,enmeshing memory: co-dreamers,immobile shepherds, surely. From a roving boy'seager vantage, not as supremeas a giraffe, oh no,but just as heaven-reaching— For the inveterate pines, perhaps,the piedmont, the crab-ruled lowcountry marshes have always beenarresting theatres: whatever was shouted or gaspedat jubilee, at the silverpoint of the bridegroom's climaxor the baby's crowning, they ably cachedin their commanding branches, so that if I lay my Hardy Boy earto the telltale bark [End Page 81] (as I did the tobacco-scentedsummer I was nine), some long-dead singingfrom vanished dooryards— supper-getting-ready songshummed in pie-cooking heat— from cabins and heart-stopping fields, is stillensconced in the pine. I'll Take You to Africa Daylean:2the telltale marshes take the last gallivanting goldand giveaway crimson, and for a brief while,quiet as it's kept, even the sternest treesseem to curtsy and be set ablazeby the razzle-dazzle sun's adieu. After love'sbodacious vowels and the agile sorceryof dusk-sharing blackbirds, it's this marriage of sundown huesand marshland shadows that moves us to speak.High in a lark-haunted, boy-loved oak,one humming lover soothes the other'sglistening nape with a ham-shaped fan,then whispers: If you wear this ring,I'll take you to Africa. Two black men together makea dipper-sweet singing, a jump-the-broom glee.Daylean, daylean: sun like a wedding caketucked beneath a pillow. Cyrus Cassells Cyrus Cassells is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, and More Than Peace and Cypresses. His fifth book...