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Tending
Cursive spine winding to the whims of its own lyric. Fugitive blooms, unbound erotic teach me how to survive. I imagine it improvising some country blues with fingertips unsheathed and raw from reaching wishward on a loop. Post cuffed to vertebra braces without consent, braces intent on asphyxiation at the root. Twine knotted beneath each petiole forbids the leaf to jump, forbids all directions but straight & efficient up. So what to do with desire then? What to do with want? Pointless to veer it with constraints until its song and your own are the same save for a dip in octave/pitch. Senseless to train it with lashes, whips singing between air & switch — a whistling/whispering eruption parting the flesh of the stem like a river oozing at an unrushed pace. O collective epidermal memory. O bloom, you Fibonacci knowledge yawning through such drowsy, sedimentary undress. |
Footnote:
This poem is composed using some phrases pulled from Beauford Delaney’s drafted letter to James Baldwin, which I uncovered within Delaney’s collection, archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Though the draft is dated only a few years after Delaney started to show signs of Alzheimer's disease and severe mental deterioration, it exists for me as a window into the intimacies of their relationship. “See me” is a poetic attempt to, as Saidiya Hartman says, explore the limits of the archive to imagine what could have been. |
