My love mentions that people see stars best from the corners of their eyes, that cones catch color in the centers, but it’s the rods on the outsides that fetch the dimmest portions of the visible spectrum—and I am forced to reconcile with the fact that something so round as vision still pushes people into corners
like those I drive by in the hood, and wonder: if spacetime had bent me a different path I could be a man or a mural on some concrete patch like these, and that either way I’d be painted away eventually. I’m forced to consider
a future son, half white, and whether or not to ever call him my nigga; that if I ever did, something somewhere between us might break jagged forever, push us to the other sides of rooms, a hypotenuse of hypotheticals always between us. I’m forced to consider
my child’s heart like a comma, caught up in clauses, murmuring a steady syntax the way a ghost drags its lips over everything unspoken caught in its chest, a soul full of expectations never met; I’m reconciling how black and white the edges of most things are, the steady strain
of looking into every corner of the sky and never finding a black constellation—already knowing the brilliance of stars is a billion years worth of old news; to reconcile with my friend
confessing he never expected to make it past eighteen, and I don’t know what’s harder to believe: his confession or the doctorate diploma he thumbs on the corner of his thirties—
to reconcile with the elderly who hear my poems and come to me, stumbling their way towards I don’t see color—and I can’t tell if it’s glaucoma or Glaucon sitting in the center of their lenses, spinning the ring of Gyges on his finger; and their mouths like a heart pulsing so petulantly I take their hand to my chest, tap out a sweet staccato: Do you see me? Shut your eyes—I am either side of that which blinds you.
This poem was inspired by a brief remark my partner made to me one day about starlight and how it is caught by our eyes. The idea of edges and corners came to mind, as I’m always thinking about the in-between spaces of race and their complexities.
"This is one of the many indictments laid out in Aimé Césaire’s searing Discourse on Colonialism (1950). 'A civilization that plays fast and loose with its principles,' Césaire adds, 'is a dying civilization.' Since Césaire’s death in 2008 at age 94, as democracies devolve into autocracies and wealthy nations sidestep poorer ones on our endangered planet, Discourse on Colonialism remains prescient about the barbarity that informs civilization."
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"Paol taught me how close writing and translating could be, and how both could pull from the deep well of changing landscapes and languages. Part of what drives this work is the way the original physical and cultural landscapes that inhabit our writing are always betraying their translations into poetry. We write the world down, but it doesn’t stay put"
