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Transcircularities
New and Selected Poems
Excerpt
Shades
of Blue for a Blue Ridge
for Mildred Howard, Joe Rudolph & Yori Wada
1.
three shades of blue
evoke minnie's can do,
soo chow's, yori wada
2.
jimbo's bop city,
john lee's boom boom room,
history riffing blue matzoh balls,
fried chicken, soba
3.
the jigoku club inside
j town, bold rebels jamming
cross from black town, udon,
grits, barbecue
4.
cherry blossoms blooming
in lady day's hair, greens & fat back,
sashimi staining kimonos
5.
you walking filmore,
crossing geary with duke,
street cars running over ghost-tracks,
pigfeet in vinegar
6.
indigo-blue & white,
red satin, sticky fingers handling
chop sticks, hot cornbread,
sweet potato pie
7.
memories brought back
in a blue mirror, gefilte fish,
kimochi, lox & bagels
8.
filmore auditorium
jamming beneath miles of blue,
bird, monk, nihomachi.
a fake dividing line
9.
mixing it all up
this cultural jambalaya stew,
kabuki, white linen,
silk, coltrane
10.
music the glue singing
new images of multi-you
rapping in the sweet blue air
Transcircularities
across,
beyond, moving toward the soon other coast,
transcending a change of appearance, as when
transfigurating a moment that is circular,
as the O of a dead man's mouth is a circle
sometimes after his last deep breath has been sucked
in,
becomes the shape of a spinning snake chasing, or swallowing
its own tail, can be a sign, an omen, perhaps, of what
has been
forgotten, erased from the circular thought-waves
history provides, the highway of metaphors:
bombs & bullets & flag-waving guiding the way
into madness
drunk on power, the hypocrisy of slaughter bombastic
with language rooted in opposing religious fervors,
greed,
the sad war dead made over into blood-dripping saints,
converted to propaganda-iconography,
now
we find ourselves once again here, as yesterday,
our speech a copy of a copy of a copy,
our histories located in roots, clues underground, bleached
bones, skulls without vanity marking the spots where
ancestral voices once swelled & grew colorful as
bright flowers
were there, rhythmic, beautiful, full of surprises,
bold with the new
twists inside language grown fresh in an instant,
then suddenly gone, erased in a blink,
as history quickly removes those who lose wars of iconography,
even as music of their speech echoes choices they made
when they stood visible, unbroken, inside their own
loved skins,
their heartbeats thumping drumbeats in time with their
spirits,
their voices musical instruments, they sang & shaped
a language they danced to then, even now you still hear
echoes of its rhythms on our own tongues here
now
the faces of those ghosts are invisible as death
coming in the dark, after midnight when most eyes shut
down,
close themselves off to light, live only inside shifting
dreams,
it is a roundabout way that we have brought ourselves
here,
shrouded in this moment of looping shadows,
whispering in this graveyard of rundown tombstones,
whispering to the memory of what could have been, like
autumn,
brown leaves scattered across asphalt, or dirt, or stone,
after the chill of coming winter's tongue sentenced
them here
to the fate of dried corpses rotting on a battlefield,
the
eyes of owls, their whooping language of mystery
our only companions here, as time tick-tocks down,
our eyes rotate upward toward where we think heaven
is,
as if looking for a sign, hoping for a savior
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