When Black poets congregate
I try to hide the gift
Pocketed out of Africa.

Like a heavy phallus,
Smooth and used to pounding
But from a woman’s hands,
From fingers flexed in seeds tossing,
From palms wavered steadying gourds
Ladled at a mountain’s foot,
From wrists thickened by a bull-wrestling,
Yes, from a tribal-scarred

The love between them spills
Beyond the groves that divide
Like arms loosely tossed
Across an unmade bed, asleep.

Not your hands, my love, nor your ordered caresses
so long elating my split heart free of its splintered crutch,
widening a soul’s eyes to a world-view a callow’s guesses
could never near; no, it is not your touch
lingering red on my lips, altering every word

Alleluia Alleluia Amen
Alleluia Alleluia Amen
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.

Mainmast’s pendulum totters on the brink
Freely swinging to meet waves’ ends;
Shadowed below, fetid blackness blends
Flaying the prone cargo so rawly linked.

Eucalyptus shades acacia:
The proximity dwindling the caliber of one
And distending the manifest bulk of the other.
Quick shapes merge but mix only
In the communion of decline, cycling perspectives
From wind-sent sapling to dangling leaf to fall to earth.

Wretched hands reach, stretch, for my own
Two which cling, fingers bound, binding wrist to wrist.
Unbuckle! Seek less familiar partners! Open
And UNclasp the grasp that arms the soldiering fist.

swerve to shore and bend to bay riverrun Niagara
nigh beside that curving shore swooshing forth
of course that swerves and winds and wends and bends
nigh beside that riverone crowdsofunknowing gather
Niagaratherings ringsounds too sure the bamboo flute
nigh flutist piping fretafret mute falls Niagara
as flute loops clinging suitsofsong round each earacoy
stringing and winging Niagaratherings again away
awake