Teahouse of the Almighty (4 page)

in the window. Much too rushed for structure, the

photographer did what he could to stun the slow

chaos—heads were twisted, eyes in blink, pubic

hair indistinct and shadowed. As sirens wailed,

the women hurried into their clothes—blouse

with nervy stink circles, skirts accordioned in haste.

Their names were nothing and they were rootless

in their wandering away. There was no sense

to their sacrifice, until the night came and the poet's

slow remembering hands returned for their souls.

MY MILLION FATHERS, STILL HERE PAST

Hallelujah for grizzled lip, snuff chew, bended slow walk,

and shit talkin'. Praise fatback, pork gravy, orange butter,

Alaga syrup, grits, and egg sammiches on Wonder Bread

slathered with Hellman's, mashed 'tween sheets of wax

paper. You hoard that food like money. You are three-day

checker games, pomade slick back, deep brown drink

sucked through holes where teeth once was. You're that

can't-shake lyric, that last bar stool before the back door.

All glory to the church deacons, bodies afloat in pressed

serge, nappy knobs of gray hair greased flat, close to conk,

cracked tenors teetering and testifying. Bless you postmen

and whip cloth shoeshiners, foremen with burning backs,

porters bowing deep. I hear swear-scowling and gold-tooth

giggling over games of bid whist and craps, then Sunday's

Lucky Struck voices playing call-and-response with

the Good Book's siren song. In the midst of some hymn,

my wilting fathers, I see you young again, you spitshined

and polished, folded at the hips on a sluggish Greyhound,

or colored in the colored car of a silver train chugging past

Pine Bluff, Aliceville, Minneola, Greenwood, Muscle Shoals,

headed north where factories pumped precise gospel

and begged you inside their open mouths. You're the reason

the Saturday moon wouldn't fall. You mail-order zoot suit

wide wing felt hats to dip low over one eye, pimp walkin',

taps hammered into heels, kickin' up hot foot to get down

one time, slow drag blues threading bone and hip bump

when the jukebox teases. All praise to the eagle what flew

on Friday and the Lincoln Mark, the Riviera, the Deuce

and a Quarter, the always too much car for what you were.

You were lucky number, the dream book, the steaming spoon

of black-eyes on day one of every year. Here is to your mojo,

your magic real, roots and conjures and long-dead plants

in cotton pouches. Deftly misled by tiny religions, you spat

on the broom that brushed your foot, stayed left of light poles.

Griots of sloped porch and city walk, you, my million fathers,

still here past chalk outlines, dirty needles, and prison cots,

still here past ass whuppings, tree hangings, and many calls

to war, past J.B. stupor, absent children, and drive-bys.

You survive, scarred and hobbling, choking back dawn ache,

high pressure, dimming and lying eyes, joints that smell thunder.

Here's to the secret of your rotting molars, the tender bump

on your balls, your misaligned back, wild corn on that baby

toe, the many rebellions of your black, tired bodies. I watch

you cluck the hard history of lust past your gums, squeeze

rheumy eyes shut to conjure the dream outline of a woman.

I am a woman.

I will rub your weary head,

dance close to you,

shuck you silver peas for dinner.

He was Otis, my father.

But you are Willie Earl and James and Ernest and Jimmy Lee.

All of you, frail charmers, gentle Delta, bodies curled against

the time gone, the time coming. I grieve you tottering toward

death, I celebrate you clinging to life. Open bony dark-veined

arms and receive me, a woman in the shape of your daughter,

who is taking on your last days as her very blood, learning

your whispered language too late to stop your dying,

but not too late

to tell

this story.

HOW TO BE A LECHEROUS LITTLE OLD BLACK MAN AND MAKE LOTS OF MONEY

for John Lee Hooker

First, you got to get the blues.

This is easy if you are a person of any gender,

and possess a pulse, a cheating lover,

a stalking ex-lover, a used Yugo, a pumping heart,

an empty wallet, a half-dead dog, an empty frigerator,

one last cigarette butt, a good memory, a nosy mama,

a lonely room, a quick trigger, roving eyes,

an addiction to whiskey,

nothing but the clothes on your back,

a jones for your neighbor's wife,

a jones for your wife's neighbor,

a positive test result,

an itching to leave,

an itching to stay,

or any itching where there shouldn't be any.

Rub your hands slow over your body,

feel the valleys, the wrongs. Let misery

chomp your spine toward collapsing,

let it fold your whole self double.

Then you can walk like John Lee Hooker do—

click shuffle, bent over, nose to the ground,

wearing a cocked brim felt fedora that wouldn't dare fall off.

Then you can think like John Lee do—

I'm old as victrola,

gotta buy a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth

if I want to feel a woman,

but I can still

sing better

than you

HALLELUJAH WITH YOUR NAME

I.

Perhaps I underestimate his importance.

After all, he was merely a crooked arm, a suit coat

dripping pressed shine, Old Spice and Wild Turkey

lending his soul a smell. He was just a flattened

and knowing hand at the small of my back, he was

nothing more than bended knees trying to match

his height to mine. The bartop was slick and glittering

with something, one leg of the jukebox propped up

too high on a cardboard square. Ask why

I remember that he never bothered to take off his

storm gray Stetson, that a single sweet thread

of sweat ran down the left side of his face, kissing

our clasped hands. I was 12, clacking knees, high-top

All Stars with flap tongues, a wad of grape bubble

plumping my cheek. He was a friend of my father's,

his name wavering now between Willie and Earl.

He was grizzled and elegant, horrifying man-smell,

bowing slightly for permission to lead the woman

in me across a slice of pockmarked wooden floor.

Daddy grinned and hooted in the face of this crime.

II.

Slow dancing is the way sin looks when you hose

it down and set it upright, and all the time it is

the considering of further things, the music being

incidental, it might as well not be there. You can slow

dance to a dollop of chocolate, a wrinkled shred of silk,

the hot static of a child's hair being brushed. Drag slow

on top of an angry lover's silence, along the jittery

borders of a rain ring, on the cluttered sidewalk outside

wherever you are. You can dance to the arcing brows

of folks wondering why you have stopped to dance. Under

the thinnest pretense, you can demand touch. Without

considering consequence, you can sign your body over.

III.

By the time of that first slow dance, I had tasted

stormwater, head cheese, starch, sweet pickle juice.

In raw sanctified churches, I was swathed in crinoline

and dipped, hair first, into whatever wouldn't kill me.

I knew how to fight for my life with a bottleneck.

I had discovered the liquid verb of my hips and had

gnawed the vinegary meat from the foot of a pig.

I could slip a thousand coins through the slot

of a juke, knowing my backbone would respond to

any song, any old keyed wail from a shattered someone.

I could exist on unclean things, slippery with fat,

and crush hugely pregnant roaches with the heel

of my hand. I dared slow-sputter four-syllable words.

Daddy taught me to be constantly astonishing.

IV.

The man who taught me to slow dance was simply

my father's friend, who lifted me from a wobbling

stool when I nodded yes. He was that first gracious

sweep, flat laboring feet, slapped smile, awkward

realizing that a memory was coming to life in his arms.

The song? A woman was moaning so hard the record

skipped to save her. She was leaving, thinking

of leaving or had left, or someone had left her.

She had nothing left. My partner off-key spittled

every third word, flashing a gold incisor that made

me move closer to him. I wanted to get all of him

over with, to squeeze his scarecrow body through

and past me. I wanted us history. I knew then why

it is always the woman who dances backwards,

numbing her short spine, circling the man's neck

with both arms. She is scrambling for a glimpse

of where she's been, the yesterday she had before

he gets hard and confuses hallelujah with her name.

LITTLE POETRY

He says I am gumpopper,

      
wondrous shoulders,

evil on the days when I bleed.

I say take hold of both my hands.

      
He speaks cool water on me,

nudges my mood with a proverb.

I watch him undress, skin

      
unto another skin, and I turn

away to keep from craving that.

By the time his hands

      
touch my shoulders,

I am almost insane

with disappearing,

and the thunder.

CAN'T HEAR NOTHING FOR THAT DAMNED TRAIN

Chaos, all sound and stench, everywhere the delirium

of the ordinary. Mamie Tuttle holds court on a lopsided

wooden porch, clearly an afterthought to her house, yelping

so sideways her gold tooth rattles:
Got room
in
my chair

if anybody need it, scratching scalp, pressing hair, S5,

make you look good this Sunday!
—all of her rollicking,

her greasy hands on world hips. For a hot minute, her spiel

drowns out the Temptations moaning for crazy love from

beneath a good girl's window. Lanky boys in worn-through

sharkskin snag the harmony, croon its bottom while Mamie,

diseased ankles damned tired now, declares
O.K.
dammit, $4!

Her answer is the cringe roll of cars on last rim, the squealed

lyric of double dutch girls pumping some God outta their legs.

Despite the sugar noise and veiled shit, you would think we'd

want out. The dying engineered green of Garfield Park, a planned

paradise of rust and splinter, is crushed into its corner, wailing

toward the world and Mamie, who is about to nap and could give

a damn: There's someplace better,

someplace lusher,

someplace past any reach you can reach.

Cover your ears.