Soweto, the present tense.

By the power lines, their long catenaries dipped with copper, I stop at the clearing unfolding in the patch of sorrel and grass and watch how the telephone cables trail off in the neural passage between sender and receiver. Eye rifling through the stand of transplanted weeping birch against the ravaged elm and red pine used for pulp and paneling, I come to leached soil and trash, clutter, and city paper - the stories breaking into black and white patterns on the page. The old news almost unreadable, its meaning is another code - the scores of African deaths piling up add to nothing. Like it never matters, the consciousness Biko brought beaten into just black names (pithed pieces the words the earth's dark skin the letters the the the) language doesn't think proper - signs for its complexion or idiom for its state. Language is occupation; can only uluating Zulus uttering blood empty their heads of its weight? I walk into America, dragging the shadow of my words like wires draped on my shoulder. I'll come to you, our expressions sagging toward one another like closing sides of a drawbridge. I'll come to you, a mouthful of doll's eyes and sour grass. We'll listen to the humming overhead, unsteady utility poles poking into the earth from their weight.

Christopher Gilbert's new book of poems, Demo/Fabrications: Music of the Striving That Was There, is scheduled for publication in 1996. He is a past recipient of the Wait Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

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