For Etheridge Knight (1933 - March 10, 1991).

Break - heart, in your madness - rejoice in nothing that is - tomorrow's the day Etheridge goes down deeper than sleep - he's gone out today like thin air - his life-force breath and spirit freed from the poor tortured body in disease will never sing again - what garbage this world is - heaped up plastic-circuit lies and foam-rubber elastics stinking like deaths that can not be without what you sing - Mississippi blues and mosquito rivers run and carry you miles like the speaking drum mantra of flesh - bone - skin - tones -

. . . your echo calls me, then as now to say to them what you told me - but the no-good Nile and ravaged Hudson run like bodies of glass bearing industrial mass - without your breathing voice anymore the trees crack like old factory panes and the leaves bleed through acid holes made by chemical rainfalls - the inhuman moon loves no one anymore . . . Old friend - for the spirit of the wood, for the beauty that made you immortal for the end - the speaking and the hearing drums pound us all away into the tongue of purest sound - poet of soul-blues/jazz and song I know too well how I miss you now, first sayer of the sooth-said psalm that gave my voice liberty to swing when you said: "Just SAY a poem . . ." and I heard your echoing power in each thing of this life-world . . .

And now all night in tiny pieces I remember how much hope and strength you lent me, your voice deep and gentle as explosions under sea as oral wisdom humbles hyperliteracy, I heard your South with awe, your America a horror show of laws - you knew all along how heady poets jam images like waters pushing over a dam (and it AIN'T got that swing to mean any DAMNED meaning thing) - how poems for the page are aimed into linear ages that never arrive - their futures never mature into now -

Speaker of truths - what else can you be? . . . Sainthood's too high and prisons make a faith of abuse - You believed in your self enough to open the deep and sweet cells of the heart even in ruins no one could bear - your voice like a thunderhead made so many leaves tremble to answer your gale with words - So many times you started over from scratches deep enough to kill ten men - I hear your grasp of hungry pain, its pulsing rhyme of clash like ragtime jungles packed with piano tigers - there every note strikes - hammering bone -

The world becomes criminally insane without you beating its cinderblock walls - without your refraining voice ringing out what must be - telling/tolling to become all you survived - transformed creating glories from agonies - but terrible beauties free-born, music of the mired-shit of foreign wars, so crises/politics/presidents become no lies, no liars, but resonance - a triumph no next wind can unhinge, your greatness pouring melody to and from what never changes and changes every thing . . . Faithful to the abuses of these killing times, you lynch the stone-deaf denial in us all, you string up love's pain with laughter piercing your own heart - the first act of love . . .

You make milk-toast critics cringe as if human experience had reached in - as if your experience were also human - like Gwendolyn Brooks asked about universality: "Isn't black experience part of the universe?" But the harmony of this universe is part ripped out now, and only remembering you, without you - yet your soul can sing: "so my soul can sing . . ."

I didn't know till this moment there was anyone who'd make me cry by just dying - I'd forgotten how to remember love till this moment of breaking - I thought I was hollow as a chime but at this touch my space is screaming out of the blues into the brackish white-water and the black sea of you -

Etheridge, Take heart in your madness - Rejoice - even when there's nothing to fill the spaces women leave behind in the air when they're gone - Rejoice even when you say "What's the use of talking to myself when I've heard it all before?" Rejoice - because the heart is mad for liquid joy - and asking what love is makes loving into retrospecting - In the air you left for me the space is my own palm now pressed like a seashell telling its roar - Rejoice - fires burn only the cold. One wave follows its brother, and till I see you as another, Rejoice . . .