Jesse

Why Does Dad Hate Jesse?

Why does my father hate Jesse Jackson
When he and the neighbor-farm blacks
Went just as gaunt and shoeless down those rusty
East Texas roads back in the days of Hoover
And followed the same mules with lopsided ears
Over the peanut plantings and corn patches
And he got to go to school and they didn’t
And their overalls and his were just as faded
And had all the holes in the same knees
And the rips from barbed wire and briars?
Why this animosity? He has never been mugged,
Beaten, spat upon, mistreated by any black man,
Or caused to stand on a bus or made to wait
In line for any public service or been denied
Entrance to any college or lost a job
Or promotion to any Afroamerican,
But he fears it all, fears Jesse’s smart voice,
Fears Jesse’s anger and indignation,
Fears his suit, his manners, and his education.
He is certain Jesse wants to take away
Everything he’s worked for and give it
To unwed black mothers to buy Cadillacs.
The old myths still writhe and hiss in his mind.
He does not know Jesse or any of his kind.
He cannot hear Jesse only Jesse’s black voice.
He cannot see Jesse only Jesse’s black face--
And barefoot figures in tattered overalls
Haunting him from the days of Hoover.

Tobacco

Its roots sunk in this dark humus
Of plagues that erupted on burning faces,
The infant wails to the deaf ears of mothers
Already departed on dream journeys of fever
In a camp with nobody left to bury the dead
Or remember the saga of the people
All those people who walked the forests
Before the sickness came,
Nameless now, ghost forms
In the lands that once nourished the nations
The melting snow rushes through streams
From whose banks the ax has gnawed the trees.
From this soil of unnamed dead
And unwept sorrows
Spring the ancestral plants
As always but now in rows
That march for miles
That now the slaves must tend,
Their black hands conjuring up
Lands long sunk beneath the horizon--
Their curses born of blood, sweat, and terror
Leak their poisons into the land.
These two poisons, slavery and plague,
Are now rooted in my blood.
I, scion of trafficers in slaves
And stolen land and pious sermons,
Am slave now of the nicotine
That made the tribal elders dream,
And now emaciates my lungs
And sows tumors in my brain.

Rendez-vous

Waiting in the dappled afternoon,
not knowing then that even the warmest days
and the oldest cities even Sevilla are all
carved from ice and melt to transparency,
finally in the skull's desert.
Drunk with the bounty of my senses in the garden of my days,
all things seeming possible, possible as her fidelity.
As I was a young man scourged by roses--
not by the thorns but by the tender folds, the delicate petals, the
profound buds, the nested arabesques of rose labia wrapped around mysteries that vaporize reason, it was possible to believe her coming
inevitable and imagine with the sincerity of delusion that I
would possess again the surprise of her apparition,
the perfume of her hair, the earthly, sacred scent
of her skin after dancing all night someplace in the hills
with a wild wedding party that swept us up by chance
and the guitar and the clapping and the heat
on the grass by the river under the moon loaned us by Lorca.
Only later was I able fully to appreciate
the not entirely cruel necessity of her having to leave me there waiting forever unrequited-- as the laws of luck and reality ordained,
lest the extraordinary become its antitheses.
But I was unaware then of the arrogance of my desire,
the gluttony of that passion for passion.
Ignorant I was of the fortune in time and faith it takes
To produce such visitations as her, whom I held once, after all,
and then brooded away many days, bitter unbeliever,
dissatisfied with my single, prodigious miracle.

Copyright 2001 by H. L. Rucks. All rights reserved.

Oldies But Goodies

Discjockey Jack says:
It's Friday night, date night,
Planting hickies wet and red
On the feverish necks of doves.
In the writhing summer night
The sweet, desolate songs
Go marching through the air
Throbbing with amplified being.
Awakening to ascend
All the winsome dragster boys
Whose chrome-trimmed coffins rise
And scream off to keep their rendez-vous
With Dead Man's Curve.
Skidding into glory
Spilled on the highway,
Washed away by winter rains.
Now all the Friday nights lie twisted
In the rusting roadside morgues
Beyond the brink of eternal youth,
Whose illusions die slowly
Like headlights in a ditch
And one wheel spinning still in memory;
Pure and round as a prom queen's mum.

Copyright 2001 by H. L. Rucks. All rights reserved.