Das Leid von der Erde, 2016.
1.
I greet my neighbors in the street.
I come from a place where you speak to people, and your salutation is a
sundial,
walking paths cheerfully.
I learned a greeting almost intimate here.
You say: How you feel? Or, How you feeling? It is not a question from
which you can rush away.
The questions I ask—Where
is your home? Where are your people from?—search out origins. The
answers reveal
a stranger. A stranger stops to ask
if I require direction. I
have lingered too long, or I look uncertain.
2.
Each person must, perhaps being watched, surreal,
by multitudes, assume the room of his own mind
is not, cannot be, a characteristic tic
revealing essential falsehoods, entirely opaque to him. You’ll say
nothing, she said. Things don't go away just because you choose
to forget it only needs
to happen once. The just risen sun came at
the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river
gleamed. Of course, it burned him. He carried the resulting scar.
The initial awareness of pain was gone, there was no mortal.
They left, sprinting; they left and time’s shape was restored. People, the
last fragments of the afternoon’s tasks, people, but there
were none, just the dry wind falling through the trees.
The intricacy of the weeds startled. Each appeared
to be intent on his own thought, our being “brothers.”
3.
They passed, and the lack
of nods felt choreographed
and white—a glance from each askance and two half-assed side steps,
except, as he went past and gazed up, she paused yawned and looked
back
wrote down in her book the cut of his shirt. He hummed a three note
motive
and thought on his hurt.
4.
There were self-published books, dashikis, posters on black
liberation, djembe drums, drivers of the black livery
cabs, early-twentieth-century lynchings of African
American photographs, awaiting the fares they could pick
up off the clock. These survivors would also come to be
forgotten. Young men in hooded sweatshirts, the denizens of an informal
economy, passed messages to each other, enacting
a choreography opaque to all but themselves.
It was careless thinking to draw the link too easily
and the sky and the river were a single darkly misted sheet
and the horizon had vanished. In the Harlem night, there were no whites. Surrender—negotiation—played a role in this.
5.
To the memory of… you cannot read
in whose memory this work was made. You must be looking down to see
them, or be otherwise disconnected. I crossed
an alternate path, walking that way,
just, in order to see the street.
It was late summer when I first saw:
elaborate messages, sidewalk writings
in the pavement, on brightly colored chalk.
Love yourself. Your life is worth saving.
Reality will outlast
you. And though they were designed to be destroyed, I felt compelled to
preserve.