Dangerous Goods. Sean Hill

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СКАЧАТЬ nothing when you come, I fear.

      I’ll miss you when you’re here. Stay

      home; keep me forever.

BAHAMAS VOYAGE: MEDITATIONS ON BLACKS ON BOATS

      Day 1

       Up the gangway of the Big Red Boat

       the SS Atlantic

       white, red, and blue

       banners and streamers

       A colorful crew croons along

       “The Star-Spangled Banner”

       Accents thick sing-songy high

       and guttural low as the boat

       leaves port out to sea traveling slow

      Day 2

       A cruise to the Bahamas

       on the 4th of July

       occasioned by a family reunion

       Below decks cramped in with

       my little brother and a complimentary

       bottle of champagne

       The champagne goes down

       The water on-board briny that of coastal cities

       port towns to which slave ships made their rounds

      Day 3

       On deck in the sun

       headphones on listening to

       Charles Mingus: Town Hall Concert

       Two songs “So Long Eric”

       and “Praying With Eric”

       After the first they clap

       and Mingus introduces:

       This next composition was written

       when Eric Dolphy explained to me

       that there’s something similar

       to the concentration camps once in Germany

       now down South.

       The only difference being

       they don’t have gas chambers

       and hot stoves to cook us in

       yet.

       He continues:

       So I wrote a piece called

       Meditations as to how to get some wirecutters

       before someone else gets some guns to us.

       Conflation and conflagration

      Day 4

       On a slave ship in the hold below decks

       Barely enough room for burial—squeezed

       in tight like a coffin too small—surrounded

       by others, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers

       like books shelved—handsomely bound

       in black—volumes in an ongoing travelogue

      Day 5

       “I was born”

       Black and bold

       sprayed on a concrete mooring block

       on the pier

       A stock line

       the “once upon a time” of Slave Narratives

       They were born in America

      Day 6

       Framed by the porthole’s red rim

       two blues meet

       Waves rise redundant undulant

       a cat’s hackles—deep blue

       (of brand new jeans he buys for the label)

       indigo that was king before cotton

      Day 7

       Bombay Sapphire I bought duty free

       in a bottle the clear blue of the water

       at a Bahamian beach

       does not comfort me.

VOICES IN ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

       for Geddes Thomas

      Christopher Wren designed it from base to dome—

      built in the 17th & 18th centuries,

      declared complete about ninety years after

      the first twenty were brought to Jamestown.

      Alone in the Whispering Gallery

      I lean to the ear of no one to my left—

       Can you hear me?

      A voice, my father’s,

      his father’s, comes from the right—

       Can you hear me?

      I’ve brought voices here with me;

      they linger the way odors do.

      A friend who visited the citadel at Gorée Island said

      you can smell death left over from the days of the trade.

FORTNIGHT

       for Eric Black

      Big Ben’s struck five again.

      Why am I here at the Millennium Wheel,

      the eye of London? I don’t want to queue-up—

      won’t queue-up, but I’m here.

      London is СКАЧАТЬ