Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa

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Providence

      I walked away with your face

      stolen from a crowded room,

      & the sting of requited memory

      lived beneath my skin. A name

      raw on my tongue, in my brain, a glimpse

      nestled years later like a red bird

      among wet leaves on a dull day.

      A face. The tilt of a head. Dark

      lipstick. Aletheia. The unknown

      marked on a shoulder, night

      weather in our heads.

      I pushed out of this half-stunned

      yes, begging light, beyond the caul’s

      shadow, dangling the lifeline of Oh.

      I took seven roads to get here

      & almost died three times.

      How many near misses before

      new days slouched into the left corner

      pocket, before the hanging fruit

      made me kneel? I crossed

      five times in the blood to see

      the plots against the future—

      descendent of a house that knows

      all my strong & weak points.

      No bounty of love apples glistened

      with sweat, a pear-shaped lute

      plucked in the valley of the tuber rose

      & Madonna lily. Your name untied

      every knot in my body, a honey-eating

      animal reflected in shop windows

      & twinned against this underworld.

      Out of tide-lull & upwash

      a perfect hunger slipped in

      tooled by an eye, & this morning

      makes us the oldest song in any god’s throat.

      We had gone back walking

      on our hands. Opened by a kiss,

      by fingertips on the Abyssinian

      stem & nape, we bloomed

      from underneath stone. Moon-pulled

      fish skirted the gangplank,

      a dung-scented ark of gopherwood.

      Now, you are on my skin, in my mouth

      & hair as if you were always

      woven in my walk, a rib

      unearthed like a necklace of sand dollars

      out of black hush. You are a call

      & response going back to the first

      praise-lament, the old wish

      made flesh. The two of us

      a third voice, an incantation

      sweet-talked & grunted out of The Hawk’s

      midnight horn. I have you inside

      a hard question, & it won’t let go,

      hooked through the gills & strung up

      to the western horizon. We are one,

      burning with belief till the thing

      inside the cage whimpers

      & everything crazes out to a flash

      of silver. Begged into the fat juice

      of promises, our embrace is a naked

      wing lifting us into premonition

      worked down to a sigh & plea.

Water

      If only I could cleave myself from the water table

      below this two-step, from this opaque moan

      & tremble that urge each bright shoot up,

      this pull of the sea on fish under a pregnant

      moon. I sweat to buy water. It breaks

      into a dirge polishing stone. The oathtaker

      who isn’t in hock to salt merchants & trinket kings,

      says, Drink more water, Mister Bones.

      The taste of azure. To rinse bile from the bony cup

      of regret, to trouble rivers till the touch of gold

      Columbus & his men killed the Arawak for

      floats up to ravenous light, to flush out every tinge

      of pity & gall—each of us a compass star

      & taproot down to what we are made of.

Jasmine

      I sit beside two women, kitty-corner

      to the stage, as Elvin’s sticks blur

      the club into a blue fantasia.

      I thought my body had forgotten the Deep

      South, how I’d cross the street

      if СКАЧАТЬ