Ed Roberson

There is nothing concrete to grasp in
looking into the morning sky
...

riding the bullet train
the view passes by so fast
...

When I worked in the steel mill
the ceiling crane dropped a bolt
...

But for a low bank of cloud,
clear morning, empty sky.
...

I have to leave early in the dark
and hungry to avoid
...

Trees have whole streets
of when they were planted
...

 As at the far edge of circling the country,
facing suddenly the other ocean,
...

May I ask you who
your grandmother died

Her blackness
you pretended we'd assume
a servant's in the photograph

May I ask
did she die herself?

I know you all light
under an umbrella don't tan
and she could be seen

as she had been made too
dark for what the son do.

I saw her years ago after she died
And again today in the market
I asked her I had to

know if she was who I knew    ...    
"Only two things you really has to —

tha's to stay black and die."
Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretend
that you have died

except you're black and alive
who are you?

She is as hundreds of years old as
the stories of the lies
of grandmothers in the cellar    ...    

May I ask who
your grandmother died if she died
herself?
...

To Iretha
A textbook photograph most likely
led me to think the Rosetta Stone the size
of a library's old Webster's Third Edition
or two loaves of bread on a side board,

but here it stands, three tongues, or one mind
that can say three ways we say the one thing,
the breaths and sights of each way in rock,
a milestone in intangibles between them.

Reflected light from outside through the entrance,
duplicating on the glass case the door
image that the stone itself is opens
when you walk around behind it exhibit

the inhibition of letters, and I see you,
not a translation, step through from beyond all description
into the calling of flesh in black skin:
beauty. Beauty. Beauty.
...

Trees have whole streets
of when they were planted

plaqued with when the city is

to inherit them dead

of age almost all at once as if

a natural bombing.





People see a bill not figured in,

a blood red

collection come

like fall's leaf due without fail

an unseen cost of the design:

pale bud and yellow blossom—





though seeming little to do this time

with tense spring

in the window

of dead and dying trees' terms up,

with expecting a life by life replacement—

not this plague of life's time





as a season across the city.

By trial we do, but don't

know how death counts the rings

from trees to clocks,

species to singled soul

at its hour. or on history's days we all die at once.
...

As at the far edge of circling the country,
facing suddenly the other ocean,

the boundless edge of what I had wanted

to know, I stepped

into my answers' shadow ocean,



the tightening curl of the corners

of outdated old paperbacks, breakers,

a crumble surf of tiny dry triangles around

my ankles sinking in my stand



taken that the horizon written

by the spin of my compass is that this is

is not enough a point to turn around on,



is like a skin that falls short of edge

as a rug, that covers a no longer

natural spot, no longer existent

to live on from, the map of my person

come to the end of, but not done.



That country crossed was what I could imagine,

and that little spit of answer is the shadow—

not the ocean which casts it— that I step next

into to be cleansed of question.



But not of seeking …it as

if simplified for the seeking,

come to its end at this body.
...

i must be careful about such things as these.
the thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared
into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
in behind them closer in the snow. the snared
rigidity of the winter lake. deer after deer
crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare
with their eyes pressed to the ice. in a sleep. hearing
the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear
in the high quiet. i must be careful not to shake
anything in too wild an elation. not to jar
the fragile mountains against the paper far-
ness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.
of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
words. like rocks. without one snowcapped mistake.
...

given to
look into the bowl
of sky

for it to fill
with future
see it turned

upside down on the grass
see the ladle pass

hear the god underneath
calling his inside
the heavenly vault eternal

how that bump
reminds me how we saw it
once

from the underside of
Nut a mother's belly


see dissolve
against her vast ground
the drowned cloud of black

lives the solution's population
of rain crowding the city
in the belly

see it now as the sea extended
the drowned city lit in this sky


see our sky
the bone clouds casting
African

tomorrows only
an arm black balletic cloud
extends itself

dark nimbic
invertebrate squall


I am handed rain
by a portuguese man-o-war
These are

new skies
once we absorb the seas'
solution as the bodies lost

the sting
fire of lightning flesh


the water
body
air

we drown together
in our living
to drink

from this
bone
...

I expected something up out of the water
not the shadow in the wave that rose

to fill the wave then splash a breath
off the abutting air then disappear.

I didn't see any of this only
the dark wave. Even the size of a whale

I don't see what I look directly at.
I didn't see the pronghorn antelope,

speed they pointed out equal our car's,
but never having seen distance so large

I couldn't pin in it point to antler
and saw in parallax instead the world

entire a still brown arc of leap so like
a first look at the milky way each stone

a star I saw but could not see.
I didn't see

the Nazca earth drawings looking at a line
like a path the vision on it my not looking up.

& trying to see from on the ground looking
from a plane thousands of feet above

maybe I saw only what the unenlightened
marking out the lines could see from there

because I never saw the figures
until shown from books.

I've told folk half the truth that I was there I was
but embarrassed never told I missed my chance

until I saw: without embarrassment
this country miss its chance looking at color

and not see what it looked directly at,
without embarrassment

act and not see that done
on its own hands not see its own bright blood.
...

But for a low bank of cloud,
clear morning, empty sky.



The bright band of light beneath the cloud's gray

I thought at first was open distance, but it's ice



that by extension raised the lake above the lip of blue lake

and spilled it farther out than that horizon



along the sky

and floods the clouds.





Seeing the distant level further

unfurl into the sky says not to trust



blue line as terminus

when a meniscus of ice



can ride up that wall of the skyline,

a measure of illusion how close



the eye can be to filled

with seeing, to widen instead the tube of that measure





of sight we are given. There is the larger

lake the wider look we open



eyes to see. That glance of the lip

put in a bigger cylinder falls away,



but how much deeper the spring

to fill the cup.



As if the surface we are seeing

drops the more seeing is added,





while we feel the stories well as our height

from which to see. And watch the dawns coming.



…I seem to be emptying

of time the more time I put in,



and see like a man with weathered eyes enough

to face to face up to the sight's field expanded



to insight. To the dark the lake can turn

and curl up like a map for poems to have





these likenesses to graph,

then come un-scrolled from semblance back



to just this lake. Water

cities are led to layout



beside. But never in stillness;

always the restoration to change,



from ice, from cloud, turning to clear

liquid—as is most of our body





water— thinned sheet, layer

that if written on or with, a bearing



a name chiseled on water

disappears.
...

1.


He turned
so fast he
wound
the spirals of his arms
tight
into a slap
in the face

he beat himself to death
dancing

he would fall
then get right —
back up
to some music
he heard
all by himself
no one to

help

listen


2. Program


We tune
taking in hand
the remote as partner
to the news.

We turn
twirling the tit
of the dial in touch to touch
between our fingers.

We feel ourselves
both touch and button
coming on.
Or is it music we two

pick up step
to that times
happening into
receiving line?


3. table. . .


Tied to a table
top the table tilted up
right so
he hung by his ankles,
he filled from
a bucket on the floor at his head
the cup at his feet
overhead with a spoon,
and when it filled,
then an attendant emptied
cup back
into bucket,

and he began again
doing the senseless hanging
sit ups like
prayer in the morning
naked,
his throat cut
draining the words
into the bucket
from

which he delivered
the blood of his songs
into
the cup of heaven,
his feet,
in
steps


4. By The Rivers of . .


The boys came in the house
home from day camp
that summer
they were stopped
so many feet into their running
through the door
made to meet the guests
required of to sing
what they had done today
They sang of being taught though
they thought they knew
already how to swim

Asked if they liked it
the youngest explained that
what he liked the best
was to come in
through the top door of the water
into the city
underneath the pool He said
he saw long lights
he liked people made funny faces
and were flying.

I am the guest I come in
through the top door of the water
4 to 12 for the public
aquarium
I'm a diver
tankman to porpoises, moray eels,
the lightning
cloud of neon tetras at my hand
I midwife the anaconda
— all 60
plastic wrap egg babies —
making a living living in a vision
city
of living cubes of water

door to door.


Door to door
tank displays
on my shift don't get visited
by out of tank appearances
in their own likeness hiding
gifts
of transcendence and wisdom
Rather than glory —
tubes and cylinders trailing
old air poor
disguise flippers for wings
and gifts no more

than of care and feeding.


Though I'm trained to their pH's and oxygen
levels this
is a lay practice of my own
care and feeding They live in
a timeless solution of their histories
the living broth of their other
lives, their dead, their brothers I find
something familial
familiar in these small squares
these boxes buried in the public air
of the aquarium,
the slave atlantic's water,

blocked each into a plot
water is one
with its everywhere:
the how many lost of the all of us
brought here —
in my wandering
going in door to door into
the gathered ecologies keeping
a watch out for the shark,
in what I bring in this extra grace
said from some black thing
to this fare
— get their care and feeding


as if some hour
in all employment living to give it
goes to their loss
where without that sorry
new york minute's
pause at ourselves in this country we lose
our colors the gray side of money
that pale
of ghosts flying folds on our chests,
and we float up
fattened by work
that is emptied of the gain
back of our lives.

They come from in between things
through as though
between things shines a door we sing
of the orisha
I hear a singing on the other side
of a door
singing going on behind the tanks
heard on the public floor
people invisibly at work
on public display
their aquarium parading the corps
we've decorated as gods thousands
of years unseen

that morning we woke when we had lost
the attempt all our supplies everything
but our lives washed down
the river left in a puddle
a fish we only had to dish up
out of its own
carapace a shelled catfish
Plecostomus and here it was
I see now recognize
one of my samples I care for
in this exhibit
all that kept me

alive 'til we reached a village.


Come back in from my own
expeditions out I know
the diving aboard landing of
the plane
made into the glittering night waters
that are
the city home

searching the long waving light refraction
for its drawing of
that African's face.



But the boys they'll grow up
in what only is a difference
in this country as if
starting the exhibit at a different door
changed the subject:
their mother white like many's
somewhere in our people here,
their African
black like a many's in
our American peoples)
father came over
long after

the middle passage on a plane
to school
A whole new subject here.
But we sit down

to Miles to Louis Armstrong
over dinner
and later a little Lou Donaldson
gets us
dancing our stuff.


5. seat


The erased unshined polish
of a board
that is a mind
unmet
nor chaired into a seat
of any solving,
gray with no answers


the slate smoothness of the cities' street
education


That moving standing still
we learn
that rest is hanging on no seat
keeping the strap
and loop's flow open
from around your neck
your foot out of the trap


The loss of grace complaint
forgets we find footing
accomplishment in that


6. Dance, for the Balance of New Mexico


We had driven until the land rover was in danger
of never being upright again at this height.

The cloud came through the window on the driver
side and out the passenger and stopped,

its center on the seat between.

To go further would have been to carry
black clown from Second Mesa's Butterfly Dance,

his foggy, white stripes floating ash
across the blackened rocks

naked from a fire his hardened body

We could hear the land rover strain, his screaming
laughter just before he'd leap through a complete

standing somersault, and we would halt
and float the truck for that moment he was air

in a sweated cloud of fear until he touched
the balance to the ground and put us down.


7. Flamenco Goyasques


We all have
women we were born of


We all were dragged out &
lined up against the sky


Know that
Somebody here stood beside you


You put up your hands & you die


. . . . . . . . . . . .





Just in . . .
Just in word.

Word

of navigational
challenges
...

I have to leave early in the dark
and hungry to avoid

crossing the snow as the noon



burns the crust

into an un-servable lake

slush instead of the crisp bridge



that would be in order

to get me over the ridge



My journal is already laundered clean

of my words and my instructions

have dissolved



into a white mash a washed bone

ball rolled into itself

of all I have in the world in my pocket





The ink is thin the paper is poor

my eyes balance on the pale

words around which a stream



flows almost erasing

the way across

the idea



Shadows the black flowers

of the light self

-sowing through the trees



dark gardens of midnight

for the gray-white morning

hour of blindness



in print miles before I am

to arrive here



To approach the waiting milestone

dims whatever else of its lantern

‘til only the placed light there is on me.



In this light barely but used to it

I can make out the staggered columns of my account

as if back through weren't the real distance:



the thin chest flag pinned on by each ridge

the titled introduction taking your coat each storm.





My letters and ribbons have been the natural—

strengths on their way to the more—

natural weaknesses— and loss. yet—



I wonder where I thought I was going—

to 've done what you must pass

examinations for before I took any.
...

The apparition of these faces in the crowd...)



riding the bullet train
the view passes by so fast
it is either a blur they say

or —like night lightning
strobes the raindrops
to a stop in midair

in that soundless moment—
maybe from the train you can glimpse
waiting there

one of those famous petals stopped still
in midair holding its wave to you
in place. write us

and tell us if
this is so.
...

There is nothing concrete to grasp in
looking into the morning sky

The evidence of red-eye
flights east a plane drawn line presents

is not a wheelbarrow solid enough
dependency as day and night

carry in coming and going
You don't see the poem

saying anything you can't see in it
White dashes of contrails'

seemingly unmoving streak towards sunrise
disquiet the pale otherwise

unpunctuated blue of dawn
breaks it off Here is that silence
...

When I worked in the steel mill
the ceiling crane dropped a bolt
at my feet the way the cat
leaves his catch on the doorstep
for me to step over it
a bolt thick as a sparrow:
the gift of it: it didn't
easy as eggshell crack my skull.

Walking underneath the el's
same bridge superstructure
when i first arrived
in Chicago this is what
I thought of a falling bolt,
having to give up my cats
and not be mad if the whole
thing falls off track aimed at me.

Buildings straight up from the street
tall slough off their "Falling Ice,'
stand-up sidewalk signs like it's nothing.
Buildings the sparrow's slam into,
fall from— watched from the window desks—
mistaking light for the sky, land up here.
The cats probably have been
put to sleep by age by now. No blame.
...