Drive - Poem

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Duriel E. Harris

Drive

Cool night, like the snap of peas or dry branches underfoot.
Someone's waiting for me: a photograph of my breath.
The moon is cropped stingy and my skin is a tethered shade
   of heat
drawn to outer darkness and the gentle sucking in the thick of it.

Looking for the turn. Dull stretch of road the weight
of any other. Rolling straight back into clannish trees
like a cinnamon woman, powdered cleavage, struck
dumb in the spirit, falls back trusting.

A dredlock creeps from behind my ear, scrapes my nose, yarn
between my eyes. I slip its tight coil into place with a motion
reminiscent of white girls' easy laughter and the prep school I
   hated,
tinged with the riddle of their dearness and my brown body
   unseen.

Looking for the turn. Sign posts become tar field scarecrows,
mute Colored, bowed heads at 3 a.m. wherever trees shoot up
in a clearing. And down a piece there's a church, one room
     sanctuary,
one paint-chipped iron rail at the front three steps. The doors

are swollen shut from rain; above them, a cross-shaped window
broken out, fist-sized, where Jesus' head would be.
Cool night passes through the jagged godhead whistling,
condenses on the stained glass pane the way a house settles,

the way our bodies soften into earth, the way our suffering
mists, seeps into the bloodstream and runs. My we,
us, we people breathing on both sides of the hold belly.
Greed and our flesh trials nursed the second half of the last
   millennium.

What I wouldn't do for a bidi. I turn on the radio.
There. And I'll turn again before I reach the leaf dense trees
to go where I'll spend the night. Haven, where someone's
    waiting
and smells like cornbread under cloth, like thighs, moist
armpits, is a double portion, ribbed, combed, and fastened.
At the end of it: a bell my fingers feel for.
Sometimes, I dream a lonely highway and wake up driving;
sometimes, I am wet and full and prone in the pasture.

While inside me, desire shepherds the hills swallowing
  night's crisp
center and loose pearls in the swayback of darkness until I
breathe, reaching, replenished, forgetting, palpable
and palatable like pulling smoke but more than momentary

shuttling lungs and ear drums, more than, until I am a dream
within a dream within a dream like electric organ humpbacks
and only-born-once Al Green's happiness squealing
eeeeeeeeeee moan for love eeeeeeeeee over road hiss

over dirt shoulder scratches over prairie far off trees and sky
darknesses taking up space until I am an ellipsis, spinning.

Duriel E. Harris, a graduate of Yale and NYU, holds her doctorate from the University of Illinois. Her manuscript DRAG has been a finalist for several first-book prizes, and her writing has most recently appeared in Step Into a World, Works & Days, nocturnes, and Fence. Currently at work on Sorna, a sound recording, she has received grants from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Chicago Bar Association. Harris is the Poetry Editor for Obsidian III, a co-founder of Black Tool Collective, and the recipient of a 2002-2003 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship.