Maybe the Saddest Thing (4 page)

Too stilted to acknowledge me.

One more time.

So I'm in transit when I see this brotha

across the aisle with his near-brown,

green-eyed son. And just as he looks

at me. No, just as he turns away

a twang or drawl betrays his lips.

He is not speaking to me.

He's talking, smiling at an old white

moth of a woman, well, wasp

if you consider her dilated pupils.

And all of a sudden I pretend

his affliction is not my own.

This isn't working, is it?

Raleigh. Brother. When you asked

Is it difficult to write about race?

I meant to say Hell yes. Yes.

Especially if you're stilted. Like me.

I find it much safer to sit at home

and feign an understanding. But

to write race is to stare firm. I suppose

you knew that.

You meant
Push me

to write about race. To re-see.

And I didn't know enough then

to advise you. Well,

I may have learned something

one keystroke ago.

Race is a triangular maze

of lush green hedges that stretch

beyond the eye's reach.

Black as I am. Yellow as you are.

As neither as this town is,

it has taken a poem: a bus,

tearing through that maze,

full speed in my direction

for me to look at you and nod.

Yes. I meant to say

Write it. And please,

don't stop.

Dear Dave,

Discovery's turned on. I am watching

sheets of ghastly, squirming, horny termites

gnawing inside a wall and missing you.

Today marks my twelfth stab at this.

Each time I begin to say something real

I collapse. Shortcomings. You understand.

This is not the one about the black comedian.

Or his fear of the toddler

pushing Kush on an ave. in the a.m.

This is not about the moment after

that joke. When the audience

slump, just a smidgen, in their seats.

When they question your position

on the ghetto's flowchart

or reconsider a weed dealer's

average age. And when they laugh—

well, this does not concern that.

This isn't a poem

about some cowboy cracking up

over a blackface skit. How his cackle

sounded like a bigot's brain

lodged inside a beating heart, thinking

out loud. This is not about that sound

imploding the logic for your craft.

Not about you leaving me hoarse

and lonely on Wednesday nights.

I repeat. This is not a love thing.

Not even a little.

for Vince, Dean & Josef

The bass player does not matter. Nor

his right index—plucking

a note so deep dead skin ricochets

from a fat steel string to a woman's

crystal glass of Grigio. No. It doesn't

matter. The trombone player's lips split

clench & swell each dark hair

on my left big toe. No matter the alto

saxophonist's other life. That this

gig saves us both tonight. The banquet hall

is chock-full of entomologists scouring

the joint for hors d'oeuvres. The room

talks too loud to hear the fat chewed

between drummer and boy wonder

on the Rhodes. But based on their

clamp-toothed grins, I think swine. Greasy

tough & filling. Death-driving.

The band's name: Urban Transport.

Bus systems drive sane men

batty. The wash of blank stares. All those

ant mandibles sculpting sanctuaries

from sand, inside sidewalk cracks beneath

street signs. Stop. After stop-stagnant. How

Granddad saw a jazzman's life. In 1962

he made my eighth-grader pops trek 27 blocks

to a dive pawnshop, double bass strapped

to his back. Claimed it a bad bloodline.

Likely hocked for heroin. Said the future in jazz

was an early exit to an underground room.

Now my father riffs

most days in the cellar with me, crooning eloquent

about voting Independent to make

some kind of point. Don't you hear me?

Entomologists study ants. Even if I think

the world would keep grinding on without them.

Someone should tell this to us who die early.

A saxophone is called an ax. The horn

is an ax. Ask Jericho. Nothing can stop a song.

Think chain gang. Or ants whistling

inside cracks. Because they must.

Mostly what I do is exercise my lungs

in praise of everything:

Meryl Streep movies. Porcelain

roosters. Daisies. Fuchsia teddy bears

gifted to better halves at carnivals.

Every bike trail and alleyway. Every

single road I walk is lined with the signage

of joy. And I'm not exactly complaining

but imagine being this way full-time.

Compare it to staring at the sun too long—

What happens after.      Goldenrod grid

viewpoint.      World as scatterplot.

My punch clock ticks from the second

I wake and it's hard to tell the difference

between shifts. Think pleasure as computer-

generated dots. Palm trees like pinstripes.

Think I'm crazy if you want

but the world actually moves me maybe

once every year. Last night it happened

at a party, when Jackie told a story

about a kid who couldn't tie her shoes.

Mornings at the tired bus stop. Try

after try, she'd loop and swoop her heart out—

folding in front of peers. But before first bell

in the bathroom stall. Or during gym

in a low-traffic corner,

her best friend, Kim, fashioned her laces

into elegant bows. She did this

with a smile. For years. Imagine

an act selfless as ducking down.

As bending at the knee, away from a crowd.

Some of what I do requires overwatering

in favor of a happy, local clientele.

My job is important, and I like it and all.

But I love that Jackie's story was told

in first person. Think genuflection

with no motive other than praise.

Think of Kim and Jackie making my job

easy but hard. Picture Jackie carefully

sliding off white Keds

to savor Kim's craftsmanship. Envision

those loops. Indefinitely intact.

Now, think of what makes you happy.

Get back to me. We'll do lunch.

In every movie there's a snaggletooth thug who pimps broken

speech or a snob poodle who shits for a living named Marcus.

It's like Marcus is the sleepless infant who weeps without fail

while you're tonguing her navel by starlight. Fuck every Marcus.

He's why you sail a hole-punched keel to nowhere you've never been.

Rastas love Garvey. Raised Methodist, died Catholic, ask Marcus

to name a market for his prayers. Miller's no better. His bass

music's fairly funky but he'd write in couplets too. Marcus,

who did this to you? Mr. Schenberg, who says this CK

brief packages right? Why not free-ball? It's gotta be Marcus

meaning Mars, or Ares in Rome. Today you got space suit high

in your underwear to declare self-war. That's just like Marcus

Aurelius penning that progressive, tender self-help text

then stoning 10,000 Christians. Empire was his Marcus

for that. In Marcus, Iowa, there's one market, five large churches

& a kid who can't absolve his bass ax-jones. What's his Marcus

tell me that. You can't tell what's homestead or honed to save your life.

Nights you shrivel through a rib in your yacht's gut. & though Marcus

can rarely swim in film, still, you live to drown another day.

& the Marcus for this Marcus is most certainly Marcus.

Something like sleep dangled our heads from great heights. All of us, snuggling up to book bags and laptops in muddled morning light. A hard halt brought snow-flecked wind and three shadows to our heated bedroom—two of which shot past and rang through opposite sides of the aisle, arms outstretched, slapping what sounded like knees and seats. Something like a lightbulb triggered inside the bus and a fair-haired woman shivered in a dingy pink cardigan near the driver's seat. Her fine jawline was full of life despite two types of red blooming from cheeks—only one of them chapped. Maybe we were all hungover—too taxed from late nights at the office or library to wake. Perhaps, we were in another world—our headphones too jacked to decipher the driver when he rose from his seat, shrugged those monstrous shoulders, and said whatever he said. Seeing this commotion, two tiny blond girls, pigtails peering from wet skullcaps, stomped toward the teary spectacle. Forming a wall before the driver, they spun the woman's knees, nudged her hamstrings into winter wind streams, heads heavy with what pulls at my pen.

I can't remember how to ride a bus right.

Just the other day, I forgot who I was

and couldn't budge to help a human in need

because the pen in my pocket was poking

my thigh saying,
Use me. Use them. Write

their stories.
As if I am not them—

that woman and her two little girls, mounting

some ten-ton thing daily, fare or no fare

rust bucket but not broken down, traveling

at a pace beyond my control. And how sad

it is, because I'm really not them. Most days

I keep at least a buck in my pocket to pay

the driver and if not, a briefcase, which says

I'm good for it. That was, somehow, miserable

to admit. I'm only telling you this because

you're reading a poem, probably spend

perfectly good bar nights feeling the world

deeply with the ballpoint pen in your pocket

and though a tad abnormal to discuss

all humans want to understand everything

and for everyone to understand us.

What I can't understand is what makes me

see differently, any three people on a bus.

Maybe the saddest thing

in the world, is not knowing how to feel

cold, plastic bus seats without thinking

of narrative arc—the ten thousand pains shifting

uncomfortably from cheek to raw-red cheek

and at any given moment. This.

They were curious.

The twelve baggy black T-shirts

chanting onstage at the local college bar.

Their chorus:
Who's sucking dick, tonight?

And from the back of the room

where I noted polos and slick dresses

bobbing “yes” to chest-throbbing bass,

every belt crack, backhand, and tongue bash

in me said,
Son, do the right thing

and stay in your line.