Excerpt from American Sublime

SMILE

When I see a black man smiling
like that, nodding and smiling
with both hands visible, mouthing

“Yes, Officer,” across the street,
I think of my father, who taught us
the words “cooperate,” “officer,”

to memorize badge numbers,
who has seen black men shot at
from behind the warm months north.

And I think of the fine line—
hairline, eyelash, fingernail pairing—
the whisper that separates

obsequious from safe.  Armstrong,
Johnson, Robinson, Mays.
A woman with a yellow head

of cotton candy hair stumbles out
of a bar at after-lunchtime
clutching a black man’s arm as if

for her life.  And the brother
smiles, and his eyes are flint
as he watches all sides of the street.
 
ARS POETICA #23: "WHASSUP G"
 
From the Latin negrorum, meaning
“to tote,” said Richard Pryor
in an etymological mode.

Look it up in Cab Calloway’s
Hepster’s Dictionary, the giant book.
Be negro, be ‘groid, be vernacular, be.

Hey, yo, Hey bro’, Hey blood,
high five, big ups, gimme some skin,
keep it on the QT, the down low, the real side.

What it is?  What it look like?
Vernacular: Verna, a house-born slave.
Ask your mamma what it means.

Old school lyin’ and signifyin’.
That chick has a chemical deficiency:
no assatol.

                    And who knows,
on the radio, what evil lurks
in the hearts of men?  The shadow do,

quoth the brethren, and fall out,
cack-a-lacking and slapping,
high-top fade to black.

AMERICAN SUBLIME

(At the same time, American paintings wherein
the biodynamic landscape explodes in flames,

ice, violent sunshine that seems to burn the canvas,
apolcalyptic nature that roils and terrifies.

The Beautiful: small scale, gentle luminosity.
Sublime: territorial, vast, craggy, un-

domesticated, borderless, immense, unknown,
awful, monumental, trascendent, transcending.

Go West and West young man, to blinding snowstorms.  Leave
shark-infested waters, shipwrecks without slaves.

Miraculous black holes of color large enough
to blot out the sun, obliterate the unending moans,

to exalt, to take the place of lamentation.)

From American Sublime. Copyright 2005 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.