The Oldest Story

1 (second person)

Maybe not that many ways to say it after all.

Your old selves fall softly, mean and short

these afternoons sky concentrates harder, but

snow isn't trying to make sense of anything.

Poached egg of the sun and the teeth you used

to eat it. Snow doesn’t rank your sins, or know

the difference between angel and engine.

You measured the distance between thunder

and flash in how many Mississippi? Now you have

lived enough years far from what gathers

and disappears between us. You don’t have to

shovel sunshine. You don’t have to close your eyes.

2 Historical Fiction (or My Grandfather Kept National Geographic)

in the downstairs bathroom

which may in part

account for summer evenings

on the cul-de-sac

with my cousins when instead

of kick the can

we played now you have to get married

off to a terrible old chief

& wait for us to come help you escape.

3 (third person omniscient)

She reads every letter from her African

lover before deciding where to bury it.

& in the time it takes her to answer another

village girl has tugged on her tightest

jeans beneath blue robes so when

she goes far into the brush to gather

wood for cooking she can believe

there remains some small chance

the pants will be too much trouble

for him who has already thrown her

down in red dirt & fallen to his knees

as that rusted sun just keeps on nodding

like a god who loves everyone the same.

4 Whiteout

How long remains

the wrong question

for falling that keeps

repeating the first

word it learned as if

the only word

in the world. There are

that many people

& still we say this

is ordinary life.

At least try? Their golf course voices?

They just called me Country, all

the smartass chicas I taught in juvie,

as the leaf blowers roared outside.

We all call this Country.

Put your hands in the air . . .

The leaf blowers roaring outside

always pause for la guera to pass.

Put your hands in the air . . .

Like you don’t care . . .

For la guera to pass, this pause says

what the big black cop doesn’t,

like he just don’t care.

For me gunning 49 in a 35,

what the big black cop doesn’t

as surprised go his eyes, then kind.

Me gunning 49 in a 35 means

I can still tell this as a story where

surprised go his eyes, then kind,

and nothing goes Chekhov at the end.

Where if I tell this as story, still

not two weeks after Trayvon

when nothing checks off again

& the old song repeats itself.

Not two weeks after Trayvon

from our big white front

itself, an old song repeats

& we rap badly, & too loud.

6 (the first person)

O my hyena

of gratitude,

so long

you have followed me

shouldering the guilt

of being

hyena.

O my mouth, on bone

and thorn you feast,

knowing

each time I say

I can’t imagine

I also say

I don’t want to.

7 Teaching the Honduran Refugees to Use the NordicTrack

It did not snow that season we hosted the folk singers

who’d walked from Tegucigalpa to Houston in flip-flops

& took them ice skating inside the Galleria, then downtown

where the window washers dangled & dripped, misreading

our lips. So when I say you don’t have to be a citizen

to lie down & die alone in the eyeless dark

as your five sisters keep trying to solder your name

into a roof or a wheel, understand I mean we

don’t have to wake covered in desert, spit-less & listening

& after they played the one about walking on water,

I thought I should instead show them the fine machine

I used every day to heave myself nowhere, sucking up

all that cold clean American air. It did not snow

as they waited, so patiently, for me to just stop.

8

One proverb suggests: You’re a big white chicken

but you don’t know your weight in okra soup.

(So much depends

upon the pot

having

a fat mouth.)

Here’s another: Being tired isn’t the same as being lazy.

More?

The song is done, but the words remain.

9

Even children can see

the world is too much

for Woody Woodpecker,

his busy heart thumping

out from his chest, as if

the rest of him will

ever catch it.

10

Meanwhile, Gilgamesh, like the rest of us,

walks his Mesopotamian mud road

wondering why we end. The gods

have him thinking he could

use a friend, and when Enkidu arrives,

their inevitable fight—think

head butt that crumbles soft

the city walls—is not,

as one might expect between animal

and animal, to the death.

More the everyday kind, each

body still trying to break

from where we touch another

without letting go.