FUGUE

1. Walking (1963)

after the painting by Charles Alston

You tell me, knees are important, you kiss
your elders' knees in utmost reverence.

The knees in this painting are what send the people forward.

Once progress felt real and inevitable,
as sure as the taste of licorice or lemons.
The painting was made after marching
in Birmingham, walking

into a light both brilliant and unseen.


THE TONI MORRISON DREAMS

1.

Toni Morrison despises
conference coffee, so I offer
to fetch her a Starbucks
macchiato grande, with turbinado sugar.


She's delighted, can start her day properly,
draws on her Gauloises,
shakes her gorgeous, pewter dreads,
sips the java that I brought her
and reads her own words:


Nuns go by as quiet as lust


Everything in silver-gray and black.

2. Workshop

She asks us to adapt
Synge's Playboy of the Western World
for the contemporary stage.
She asks us to translate "The Birds."

She asks us to think about clocks,
see the numbers as glyphs,
consider the time we spend watching them

in class, on line, at the hairdresser's.

In class she calls me "Ouidah" and I answer.

"I am the yellow mother
of two yellow boys," she says.
I sit up straight.

Now the work begins, and
Oh
the work is hard.

3.

She does not love
my work, but she loves

my baby, tells me
to have many more.

4. A Reading at Temple University

"Love," she wrote,
and "love and "love" and "love,"


and "amanuensis," "velvet," "pantry," "lean,"


Shadrack, Solomon, Hagar, Jadine, Plum,


circles sth runagate


and then,
she whispered it,



love



OPIATE

A date with Michael Jordan proves
he is a true gentleman, arrives smiling,
bearing a bouquet of red carnations,
driving a modest sports car, in a sober
but stylish navy-blue suit. He grins that grin.
Hello Michael Jordan then off you go,
have your date, then have lovely safe sex,
after which you remember, you are married,
you don't know Michael Jordan, even though
he is your age-mate, and lumbers
off the championship court nowadays
looking much like you do after nursing
your newborn at four in the morning
blue night after inky blue night.

"Michael Jordan
is the opiate of the masses," comes a voice
at the end of the dream, perhaps John Cameron Swayze
or James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. "Michael Jordan
is the opiate of the masses." Opiates are verboten
for nursing moms like me. Improbable, ominous;
our date was so Father Knows Best, so
Mayberry RFD, such a wide, wide grin.
I wake to a foghorn, "Opiate of the masses,"


no memory of the feel of his dark and lovely skin.


TOMATO

My friend Amy has a jones for pregnant women,
wants to fan their flushed faces, pull out chairs for them,
carry parasols above them in strong sunlight,
fix figs with mascarpone for the calcium and iron.

I long to be the rosy, pregnant woman people flock to,
hear other women's chattering wisdom, tales:
a sister whose teeth fell out from too many babies,
milk that spurts across the room at any cry.
Her hair went curly. Her hair went straight.
Her face erupted in red sprinkles.
How are you eating? What are you dreaming?
Dream of strawberries, the baby will have rashes.

And then one night I dream of Susan Sarandon.
She's a radiant red tomato in a straw sun hat,
digging in the rows of her organic garden patch,
a million months pregnant,

and her lover is feeding her chocolate, square by square.


AFTER THE GIG: MICK JAGGER

The baby cries. Mick Jagger swaggers backstage,
lit with sweat. The crowd still screams outside.
He's been second-lining with a gaggle of New Orleans Negroes,
a white parasol, wares toreador pants and is bare-chested, bones.

I've forgiven the Rolling Stones for fetishizing me
and my sisters in "Brown Sugar" and "Some Girls."
Black girls, black girls, black girls.
Why does so much flotsam populate my brain?
Why not ancient Ge'ez, the Mingus discography,

suminagashi paper technique,

something utilitarian?

This is a four weeks postpartum dream. Mick Jagger's
black baby cries again. Thank God, it isn't mine.
Gotta go, love, gotta go, he says,
and shrugs his bony shoulders,
grins that reptile-mammal grin,

picks the baby up, coo-coos,

and then rocks that baby down.

Copyright 2001 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.