If you play me then you Play yourself. That was All the dead needed To say. To get the better Of time, we got better With time. I left my body And took on the look Of a man. I made him An honest woman. A diagram of this Sentence builds a Structure made from Wind. Inside of that House is a box. Inside The box is the head Of a goat. Inside the Goat: a knife’s quiet Song. The blade of Desire is the silver in My teeth. My mouth Has a certain ring to it.
2
I will take you now to after- Life’s kitchen, where the salty Girls cure meat with their tears. Only through time is time Conquered. Come correct. Come prepared to sit at the table Of contents. We bow our heads, Count our blessings like Little pigs, while the king- Fisher waits for a shaft of Sun. Sprint, said the bird, For the foothills of truth. Stop, stop, stop, said the bird, There is mischief afoot. Then We sat and ate with our hands, An entire field of wild thyme. When asked to choose a hill To die on, we wanted to kill The bird. To reconcile our pain We made the stars into a bear. Myth made all the difference.
3
If your wrist holds a five- Nailed star, clock the T. Who can open the door to night And not see themselves in black? Not I. For thousands of years, I have sat on a milk crate. Stationed at the crossroads, I sing: Bone. Bone. Bone. Bone. Bone. I don a yellow jacket and fox- Gloves to push out the sun. The morning is such a production. A ghost—aghast at the sound Of singe, a crowned knot of fire. There is no sense to be had In the country of our making. This language a garden Of strain. No limit Soldiers, we marched To the drum of empty Cups and if a spoon fell A woman was cursed.
4
When I was sold Down the river, God set down his book In the shape of a tent. That day I was born again, My limbs—American letters. The stairway to heaven is Yellow-boned legs, antiqued In their quadroon rust. At the gate to eternity, A lawn jockey grins, wide As the science of mercy. In his hands a badminton Racket. He swats and we See how they run, how Crickets gallop in the Dark like horseflies. Heaven is a thousand Chandeliers, every crystal A single body, each head A grizzly sparkle.
Remembering the work of Jean Valentine, who died on December 29, the former poetry editor of The New Yorker, Alice Quinn, said, “She was brilliant at evoking the power of love and the endlessness, the indwelling aspect of eternity that we feel....She reproduces the drama of recalled words and moments, which manage to convey the ineffable.”
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"I have read a wide shelf’s worth of books of translation theory, but when I actually sit down to translate, especially poetry, all of that beautifully formulated theory goes out the window, and I am faced with the poet’s mind, and my mind, and how I am going to get them to work together."
