Blood - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by Jeffery Renard Allen

   Blood

   --for Elijah, my first-born

   Skin holds red host
   to virulent world

   Air supports the rare body

   Self moves out to
   surface of skull
   to probe danger-probable element

   This I should tell

   The glassed-in nursery rocks/out-of-tune choir,
   tiny nude singers, each in her/his own plexiglass chariot

   Sustained concentration screens in motion

   The mute colors of fresh arrival
   Your coiled fists seeded knots of becoming
   hiding some promise

   Washed in the blood

   Your mother pillowed up in her curtained
   quarter of the disinfected room
   the smell of clean work
   the sheen of labor
   proud and excessive female form

   This too I should tell:
   Guniea, Ife, Jefe--some residual land
   scape rehearsed on fabric
   a rocking porch under starlight storm
   fierce listening
   springtime leaves on glossy branches
   firm boundary line
   or some athletic veil turning somersaults on taut laundry cord
   Pauses

   on an up
   draft,
   curled wood shaving

   --and whatever else is traceable to these sources

   No puffed out winter birds
   No jive buzzards or shucking crows
   Beaked tribes or razored kin throwing shade

   Keep them all away

   Days after the storm
   I trudge through a world
   snug in a sleeve of snow
   cramped and filthy sun
   Curbside
   a van swaddled in white:
   Dios es Amor

   Odd hand touches odd other,
   both translucent with memory, backlit tissue, separate stills no
   larger than
   a thumbnail:

   Elijah
   Nasir
   Mekhi

   the crest and break of name
   radiant waves
   acoustical motion

   I track glimpses of my father in a black forest where trees
   serve as stand-in screens
   hide and harbor

   Twenty-five years (more) since last sighting
   but his face retains its petal shape

   (The imagined bird is fainter than the actual,
   sought for movement less substantial than sweat)

   Mom says,
   "The older you become, the more you look like your father"

   Morn says,
   "Whenever you open your mouth your father slips through"

   Iron Man in my knuckle-headed elegance

   Heir to a familiar reptoire of pulsing
   deeds, ever-expanding empire, your red universe
   my heart

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of Harbor and Spirits, a collection of poems, and Rails Under My Back, a novel. He is a recent winner of a Whiting Writer's Award and a Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review.