What hasn’t met you – Elegba
soliloquy 1
I drove
the 15 hours to see my daughter born,
to hip
her to the wind that that buoys sails
before –
presumably – I’d drive back
and give
her bridges to cross to get
to me –
leave her the map by which she’d find
her
father. But instead, I’ve found myself
here,
among the flatness and the windsweptness
the
bitter cold and the bifurcated city
holding
my ear to the ground trying
for a
clatter to lease for her first dance.
I’ve
thought about being
a father
before all this so I’d planned
some
things – picked some colors out
and
selected some tunes. If I’m real
I’ve
always known it’d be a girl
too. You
don’t spend your whole
life
learning how to shadowbox troubles
to not
have all the orishas get together
and
dream up one last river for you to cross.
And the
girl ain’t the troubles but the orishas
don’t
bring you the war without telling
you how
to suit up – showing you the armor
And so
it is you end up, where you end up.
Call it
Chicago this time and call the girl
Freedom,
call her Savior, call her She who has been calling
from
beyond the guf for many years, she who has
come to
your dreams as the lover you couldn’t place,
whose
face is always averted, who makes you chase
her in
the rain. So you drive the 13 hours.
From
your window you can hear grackles,
cardinals,
sparrows quarreling for dominance
over the
boulevard’s early Spring offerings and you
want to
wake the coughing child and tell her
about
the sharp rhythmic claps that call pigeons
to
flamenco above Brooklyn rooftops just before
sunrise
– if one morning you were broken-hearted
and your
woman recently moved out so you climbed
the
ladder up through your ceiling and onto your own
roof
just before the day breaks rakish into color,
and laid
there and cried for the pigeons, the city
the
water tanks on the roof tops, the Puertoriqueno
hand
claps, like you knew you’d be leaving soon.
I want
to tell her what’s in the 15 hours and why her Papa
chose
the colors he comes to her in, like it’ll matter
to her.
Like she’ll know better what love is, what mine
wants to
claim every morning I climb into the dark
and come
in search of her. I hadn’t intended to
stay.
I hadn’t
intended to shepherd her citizenship of this
place. I thought I’d teach her the names and
spellings
of all
the bridges from here to Brooklyn, and how to cross
them in
order so she might arrive one day clutching a cigar
in one
hand, a machete in the other and my name
like a
grip of tulips coming from her throat.
You
don’t drive 808 miles alone
without
being transformed, without devising
whole
new schemes and reasons for why you’re making
the trip
just 2 hours outside your destination.
You’d
better if you hope to reach the new place
equipped
for the new bullshit
a city
tries to learn you while you’re searching
for its
dance floors and séances
its
Black folk and soul food
its bass
and the new basements
you want
to blue-light your ribcage
through.
But
that’s how you leave a city. Pile a van
high
with things given you with kisses,
so high
you can’t see out the back window
and take
them 13 hours to some place
you won’t
be recognized, until a girl comes
screaming
into the world and looks immediately
for your
chest, who coos into the songs
you’ve
been saving for her. Say it like this:
like the
old people have told you for years –
what
hasn’t met you, hasn’t passed you –
you’ll
understand that even as the principle
of the
sound coming back around the same
groove
of the same turntable whose needle
hiccups
imperceptibly at the moment that was once
smooth.
You’re grateful for that hitch
in your
step, for the thunder of pigeon’s wings
whenever
next you get the chance, for the girl
more
patient than you with the morning
and the
singing and all the telling you keep
dragging
her toward.
To schedule a reading or an appearance please contact Ofer Ziv at Blue Flower Arts at 845-677-8559 or email ofer@blueflowerarts.com.
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