Rickey Laurentiis Poems

New Orleans, Louisiana
For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.
Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct
alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out
a need to know. You only feel you need to live.
That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest
fills with a strange new air, you will not ask
what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf's teeth,
but you are not the lamb. You are what's in the lamb
that keeps it kicking. Let it.
...

O fly away home, fly away.
— Robert Hayden
There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can't see
what the world sees seeing him.
They know an image of him they themselves created.
He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger,
each limb adjusted, because it's had to,
to achieve finally flight — 

though what's believed
in him is a flightlessness, a sinking-down,
as any swamp-mess of water I'm always thinking of
might draw down again the washed-up body
of a boy, as any mouth I've yearned for would take down,
wrestler-style, the boy's tongue with its own    ...    

What an eye can't imagine
it can't find: not in blood, swollen in the stiff knees
of a cypress, not definitely in some dreaming man's dream — 
Let's have his nature speak.
What will the incredible night of  him say here, to his thousand
moons, now that he can rise up to any tree, rope or none, but not fear it?
...

I saw I dreamt

Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope
Not closed on their breathing

But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow

Suspended
From the mood of a tree not American they were

African Ugandan Nigerian

Without a license a right to touch
The sin their touching incites

And I heard their names called out Revision

Or Die and You Must Repent
And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots

Called up from the mob

Of their mothers their fathers
With Christ in the blood who had Christ in the blood

Who sung out "Abide with Me"

This was my eyes' closed-eyed vision
This is what a darkness makes

And how did I move from that distance to intimacy

So close I could see
The four soles of their feet so close I was kneeled

Could lick

Those feet as if I was because I became
The fire who abided

I saw that I dreamt

Their black skin made blacker by my feeding
I thought Christ

Why did I think

Their black skin tipped blacker by this American
Feeding but just one shot up

A cry African it was

American O Lord abide with me
It was human lusty flat

You had to be in the hollow of it to taste it

You had to see how in such lack
Invention takes hold

They say some dreams come in the moment

Of waking
Stitched because daylight likes a story

That some dreams are extensions

Of an itch
Thief-walking the coral of the brain

I say

But I did feel that one blue mouth blow out
As I felt

The mood of that tree

As I saw the other turn away apart stay with silence
I stayed with southern silence
...

About the dead having available to them
all breeds of knowledge,
some pure, others wicked, especially what is
future, and the history that remains
once the waters recede, revealing the land
that couldn't reject or contain it, and the land
that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived
as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived,
simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said
they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences
silences: sometimes a boy will slip
from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,
sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.
...

Tu Fu, "Thoughts While Traveling at Night"
There's a wind in the grass — 
Is there here
a boat's mast claiming my lonely night too?
I see the stars
can't be called hanged, exactly,
just hanging down,
not over emptiness, but honest ground,
the moon trying the black skin of this river, black corpse    ...    
But, even plainer — 
I wonder if these words, my words,
will ever bring me fame.
I have my age, my injuries. They limit me.
I'm like some spook bird
I know, solo and roped between
where rotting happens and a sky.
...

We aren't the solid men.
We bend like the number seven.
Dig at corners, eat cobwebs, we
are barefoot and bare-legged.
We hang like leaves in autumn.

We aren't the stolid men.
We scribble in familiar ink
about sunfalls and night. We
see the white in the sky, and sigh.
We lie with penciled grins.

We aren't the men, any men.
We rip at the neck and wonder why
while rattlers roll in. Bent
as a number, crooked, sundered,
we aren't the idle lightning

if black thunder.
...

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador's
black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped,
his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away.
If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her;
if not for that Native woman's quick intelligence, out-climbing   ...    

This is what I see: the Spanish moss
as convicted to its branches — gray, colonial,
but in my century now, suspended so close each vein might well be a whole, hanging
fiction of my mind. The moss
is a fiction of my mind: a screen, swinging
on its gothic hinges, making the light fussier as it swags, giving not just the trees
but my idea of them a Medusa look. That man,

I think, had wanted to feed something in himself
not worth feeding, had founded a world on it — 
What is it
my mind wants to get at, always extending, hungering, looking
back, always tearing open again its own modernity,
as if each thought is more than the little present
moment it sounds like, but, raised at an angle, piercing me, having me imagine,
to build such antique violences in my head, it is a thorn? This moss
has been growing for ages now, can do nothing
but snag and grow   ...    What is it the mind won't
unsee, beautiful flaw? In another version, the woman dies
and her husband
braids her hair
through the trees.
...

For Nicole and John


She drew a name full of winning flesh,
Victory, I mean, so that any Yes she has to say
We might say is a Yes achieved happily all her own—

And he drew a name large as any god,
Large as a wall in the center of the night, and as calm,
God in the most gracious, the tenderest way.

To be, like them, in a tenderness now,
Chill as April; to feel ourselves, like themselves,
In a communion of that sprung blood; and to trust

That in the dark, in even the wild, forbidding dark
Which by fact must come, is no threat,
No sudden evidence to break and unheat—

Then we're complete. Flesh falls away. Gods do.
I will make a man out of you, says one
To the other. I will make a woman. Isn't that

What to say I choose you means, means I let go
The name I held only for myself to step sharply into yours,
Into that bareness each for the other makes,

Outside the old conceptions, the old laws,
No she, no he—but together you become a single self
That spans the sense of the imagination,

Wiser than the oldest language, which is love,
More patient than the deepest song.
...

Given what I am, if
not cannibal for, animal for: he
who let go a door in me, be-
cracked my sternum to a hundred flashing moths, oh handsome, oh — Truth
be told: I hungered this, needled it out, I
stretched for this. Always a field stirs, would
stir, for want of being filled. Dwell
of me, my Eden, my Hook. In
pleasure weren't we founded? At the
start didn't we blend and blur? I would be his bravery, illusion
of his fearlessness and his fear. Given what I am only, of
meat: cut fire: the inconsolable: of these, Him.
...

Like you, I was born underwater.
(I lied: there was never a stone.)
Like you, I was born but that's not the half of it:
I lived. Lord, I lived. Like a cancer, I crept
sideways. Like a scorpion, I lied. I lived
the way a problem lives, openly, so much
earth wanted me closed. Don't you know the dead
are not easy? Don't you know they crave?
I stepped out of the water (I was made doing this) slick-
skinned, fluent, a character: my eyes twice
haunted, my humor, my voice — and can't you hear
shackles running the length of my voice? I was born
in a minute, in a panic, on a whim. A mistake,
I mean. A choice between this world and a body,
pretty fault where a heart should be.
...