Hard to Listen (Slight Return).

Hard to Listen (Slight Return)

   Up
   pillows edge to edge
   open book

   flock of sperm spread over my sheets

   I scroll tobacco in high registers
   cross cotton
   eyes wide as tambourines

   Framed
   free-flapping jeans rigged to rope

   Seaside boats bob in seven-waved surf
   heaped up

   King did not hang
   Strapped
   he bides his time in volatile depths

   What use to rise
   High wall and low ditch:
   all the geography a nigga
   gotta know

   Humble things
   mud
   beneath
   pitch

   second-knuckled compost

   I prepare my bundles for travel
   icarus of the ashes
   burning with the clarity of cud and cane
   Witness with a slave hand
   houses flashing on like so many shrines
   and frayed birds adrift jelly fish on the horizon

   Far Rockaway, New York, March 6, 2000

Jeffery Renard Allen is Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he teaches African American literature and creative writing, His books of poetry include Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, both published by Asphodel Press, and his novel Rails Under My Back received the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction.