Border
They warned me when we stopped
on a barren street, trees thick
on each side of the narrow uneven
tarmac, the hills from which we
had descended a comfort behind
us; they warned me when I said
I heard something other than
the chattering of birds in the trees,
something like the hint of music
but with a strange pulse as if
the musician had forgotten
himself; they warned me that
that was the border, that I should
never go near the border,
that at the border the floorboards
are marinated to a supple bounce
by blood and sweat; that the
conductors in their black suits
and boxy neat caps are often
pregnant, the way most men
are not, and they play with
white familiar dogs as if
they are gods, while all around
people dance and cavort
and laugh like we know people
do in those way stations
before hell; so I stood
still, and tried to let the light
and the blue wrinkles of sound
from a river nearby sweep
away the giddy circles of
music from the border, but
even after we drove into
the reassurance of mountains
the sound followed me
then settled on me as dreams do.
An Unfinished Life
He said he had heard that the cold up North
kept a body fresh like ice days in South Carolina’s
winter will keep butchered flesh fresh for weeks.
He heard say that up there in Pittsburgh a black
man’s innards could last much longer, first
the cold and then a dose of brown liquor to pickle
the softer parts, make them last. Garret Brown
got that clean black as cool look that only
Gullah folk from Summerville got; the kind
you see in a white shirt, skinny boy with a
round as a penny face running errands here
and there, that was a boy turning into a man;
slavery still carrying its old stench in the air.
1873, they started walking ’cause everybody
told his mother that Charleston is an auction
block. “Charleston is too hot for negroes,
Charleston will break a black man with
fear.” This is why Garrett Brown started
walking—first to Louisville, Kentucky,
then as a man with a head full of
dreams, over the hills and valleys,
across the rivers and streams, into
the metal sky of Pittsburgh where the green
is cool as the air, and everything
lasts forever. Well, Mr. Garrett Brown
is dead, his lungs rotted out, and the cold
just stopped up everything in him,
made his bones shake with fever
each day, and cold will preserve
everything, good and bad; like all those sad
feelings he would feel when he heard news
of the deaths in his family down there on
those sea islands where the body worked
itself to death to fatten those white folks
summering in Greenville while the muggy
rice fields cooked the souls of black folk,
making a short life a blessing down there,
while he coughed away his unfinished
living in this cold place. So we stay
silent, take a breath for Garret Brown,
dead in the height of his power, dead
at 44; gone, gone, and the swirl of snow
in the air holds us still in our
perpetual sorrow, fresh as the scent
of newly butchered meat on ice.
Blossom
The tourists fear the teeming hordes.
In the gloom they can hear the earth
breathing. It sounds like
a multitude so tired of running,
so tired of talking, so tired
of protesting, the fingers blistered
from the burning of the offending
thing; their bodies so worn
out from marching, with just
enough left in them to make
the slow march back home
with the mountain’s long
shadows leading them along
the path; or to make one last
leap, sprint, howl into
the horror—in the gloom it is
possible to hear the gap
between thought and thought-
lessness, between memory
and forgetting, between mercy
and mindlessness. The tourists
do not want their hearts to thrum
in their throats, but like all
who fall prey to the throng,
they are seduced by the fat
nocturnal bloom of a flower:
off-white, almost golden cream,
smiling handsomely at them,
and they risk all to seek it out,
to pluck it, to pretend as if
it will last beyond the journey
and continue to glow
back in their dull grey-steel world.
Kwame Dawes is a Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet, the award-winning author of sixteen books of poetry (most recently, Wheels, 2011) and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing program.