Urban Renewal
2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 131; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2023.0004
ISSN1934-421X
Autores ResumoUrban Renewal Major Jackson (bio) lxxviii I treasure any man who fashions his walkafter the woodcock’s sky dance,and any woman who turns her neckso that her body resembles a candle, so we’d glanceon all her secret fires and wonderwhere do we come from, what fording place,what delicacies of light the Dutch Masterscaught divining a window or bowl of figs and dates.We cannot afford anymore Elmer’s bayonetingchildren on the streets of Oakland or algal bloomsdeclaring war on the cormorant, or the bad debtsof the Tennessee warbler who has just resumedon my shingled roof his mortal complaintof our ingenious takeovers. Hey, are youblazing like Vermeer’s paintbrush? Is SaintPedro at heaven’s gate begging for yourdna? Some gentle Roman soldier raspshis last dying prayer in Camden. Halftimecommercials erase our trample marks.How do I know you’re not climbing the linesin this poem, folding magic into your hearts? [End Page 71] lxxxi Pine shadows on snow like a Jasper canvas,if only my pen equaled the downy’s stabbing beakthis January morning, her franticchipping, more resolve than frenzy, to make a feastof beetle larvae, if only my wood-boring eyescould interrogate the known like pillars of sunlightthrough fast-moving clouds scanning the sideof Corporation Mountain where on a distant ridgewhite plumes dissolve like theories. I cannot hearthrough winter’s quiet what’s worth saying.Saplings stand nude as Spartans awaiting orders.The entire forest is iced-up and glistening.Sealed in its form, the austere world I’ve cometo love beckons, earth runnels soon resurrectedinto a delirium of streams and wild fields. Till then,branches like black lines crisscrossing the sub-Arctic. [End Page 72] xciii The dead are a reservoir of secrets which they hoardlike limes in invisible caves. The deadare disciplined and close rank like catenaries.Occasionally, a night wind pilfers soft wordsstreamed from their occult of mysteries. The deadavoid all eye contact yet the light the dead seeis all lantern that taunts and calls them backacross the firmament. They sing at the footof myrtle trees and read the classicsevenings in dentist chairs. They smell likedisinfectant. Like us, they open their hookedmouths to taste first rain, a wide, thicktongue like a dry countryside. If only we couldsee them in between lanes of traffic or cross-armedin our hallways inhaling our love cries, enviousas our pious hands roam like forlorn clouds.They avoid graveyards which make them squirm.The dead have an incurable habit of thieving.The dead want a vacation from the job of being dead. [End Page 73] cxii Over and over again I bring the peach to my mouth,the peach of thunder, the peach of bare necessities,the peach of starry consolation, a singular pathof desire along my brain stem, the peach of my enemieswhose slights flyover like poisoned air, darkas an ink blotter, or like honking geese whose blaring stillI welcome. Look at my cheekbones, wet and stickywith the juice of living. What arrives as a riddleto others cloudy mornings is merely the conundrumI enter like a raft going downstream over rough waters.I like going in, even against the odds. I swimin pond scum. I go to the bank like a pauperand meditate my future between its alabaster columns.I want no handouts. My pulpy tenacity perfumesthe air, the peach I sink my teeth, solemnas the priest of time, another Lazarus forsaking his tomb. [End Page 74] Major Jackson Major Jackson is the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli. He is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Copyright © 2023 The University of the South
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