"The Plum Flower Dance," winner of the 2008 Paterson Award, is the first book in the "Plum Flower Trilogy" series. Written between 1985 and 2005, the book is a collection of poems written in the process of self-discovery and meditative soul-suturing that chronicles the author's healing from an abusive childhood. It includes new work, poems previously published in "My Father's Geography," "Timber & Prayer," and other collected works.
High Sierra
I take my Schwinn High Sierra bicycle
down the gravel road through the woods.
I am afraid of the physics of speed and hills,
afraid that the whir might become a hush
where the trees, brush, and flowers whisper
a song that wishes away virtual harm.
You warned me of this danger when I abandoned
you in the steel skeleton of the warehouse.
I left my home and my wife, emblems of failure.
The brakes squeak on the steel rims.
They sound like a bird with a broken wing
caught out in the thick undergrowth.
It hopes that no predator, cat or fox,
will find it and rip its weaknesses,
cut it to the bone and beyond to where nothing
is left. What will verify the imperfect memories
that we hope will resurrect the dreams
that took body and then disappeared?
Do all the moments of a life fade
into the scattered conversations of the old?
At the blessed bottom of the hill,
I look back up at the top, where I began.
It eludes me, shifts with shadow,
moves along in alliance with the sun.
I cannot see the sun, its heavy fire.
I circle in the sand on the bottom,
wonder if I have succeeded or failed.
I am not sure if I can pedal uphill,
even with the lowest of my fifteen gears.
They are so low that I am not exercised.
In a northern light away from my southern birth,
I ask you, my friend the trumpet player,
may I pretend? Why do land and love bind?
Lamentations
If only my soul were a messy garage
outside the house I have always wanted.
Then I would be a pile of fenders,
old tires and engine parts, carburetors on
shelves, wrenches everywhere, buckets of dirty oil,
some skeleton of a car in the middle with old
lawnmowers. It would be a tinker’s joy, you
in the corner there, sitting beside me, the two
of us not quite finished, not joined with sires
that pull the current around, make the lights go.
I could go over to you, shuffle over, step
in puddles of grease and grime, follow the squeak
of your voice like the up and down of old springs.
Putting your parts with my parts, we look
like the working thing that we should be.
Sputtering, we come to life, and this stumbling
mechanic we have been for so long falls into
a pile of bolts, wires, nuts, panels, and grease.
He sleeps while you and I resurrect
him whole and full. Then we die again,
fall back into the incompleteness. Back
and forth this goes, until in one realization
a brand-new car rolls out of the garage.
We sit in kit, me driving, adjusting the radio,
with a license plate saying “Father and Son.”
Mt. Zion Baptist
Before Grandma couldn't walk,
we all went to church together sometimes.
We sat in one little group on the pew
like the pictures of black folk
on the backs of the fans we used
to cool ourselves in the church.
Mama wanted me to always do things
like they supposed to be done.
Her word for right was businessfied.
Even now when I am making love,
the woman gotta know I'm businessfied.
The singing was usually good,
and I knew all about this church.
I was in Sunday School and on
the Junior Usher Board.
I went to Baptist Training Union.
One Sunday in winter we went
to morning service, and I got bored.
I was getting to be fifteen,
feeling like a man, smelling my pee,
as Mama and her sisters called it.
So I put my hands behind my head
in church and closed my eyes.
I didn't want to hear that mess
the pastor was dragging out himself.
We went home and Mama told me
to go in the back room and take
my clothes off and get ready for a beating.
I took off everything except my underwear
and waited for her. She came in
like the roll of thunder and beat me.
I cried the cry of shame. I wanted Daddy
to come and save me. Mama had
gone stone crazy on my behind.
When she knew she was dying,
Mama apologized to me.
It was spring. I was thirty years old.
Going to Church with C.W.
We spellbind like the annunciation.
You amble over to your cane,
favor the leg that threatens to surrender.
I shuffle over to the cordless phone
to peek at the red recharging indicator.
Two cantankerous supplicants, we head
for a New England church, wooden and white,
an eightyish white woman with her companion,
a thirtyish black man with his diva.
We slip through the wet grass to worship.
Down the road, Jesus. Down the road to joy.
Shadows of the congregations of leaves
whip over the car like a lover’s whine.
You ask me about the book I manage
barely to write, slowly, with pain.
You resurrect again your Radcliffe degree
in literature, your fondness for Victorian fiction.
I remind you of your rude impertinence,
how worship blurts out our duty
to be meditative, to acknowledge the splendor
of the sun’s confident slide over the mountains,
of the minute splash of butterflies in the stream.
I come Lord, come this way to please you.
We waddle into the temple. Floors creak,
heads turn, eyes spin, and mouths drop
as we go to the front pew. You fix
your eyes on your almost century of life,
from the roads, the dirt roads before the car
to the unmarked highway that leads to the moon.
I wonder how long I can stay in your grace,
how the separation will wake one sad day,
how we will find excuses to hurt each other.
Through the benediction and the hush,
we walk together outside, an unusual machine
turning on the pistons of forgiveness and curiosity.
Halfway home we stop at a store for ice cream.
