Afterimages

I

However the image enters
its force remains     within
my eyes     rockstrewn caves
where dragonfish evolve
wild for life     relentless and acquisitive
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.

A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson
recalled in me forever
a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep
etched into my vision
food for dragonfish     learning
to live upon whatever they must eat
the fused images beneath my pain.

II

The Pearl River floods the streets of Jackson
A Mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain
a white woman climbs from her roof into a passing boat
her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney
now awash
tearless     no longer young     she holds
a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.
A flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain
a microphone
thrust against her
flat bewildered words
         "We jest come from the bank yestiddy
         borrowing money to pay the income tax
         now everything's gone. I never knew
         it could be so hard."

Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud
caked around the edges
"Hard, but not this hard."

Two towheaded children hurl themselves against her
hanging upon her coat like mirrors
and a man with hamlike hands
pulls her aside     snarls
"She ain't got nothing more to say!"

And that lie hangs in his mouth
like a shred of rotting meat.

III

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 14 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21-gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
eyes averted from each corner's photography
newspapers     protest posters     magazines
Police Story     Confidential     True
the avid insistence of detail     pretending
insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy's loins
his grieving mother's lamentation
all over
the veiled warning     the secret relish
of a Black child's mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise.

And wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children's blood
with savored violence
with pictures of Black broken flesh
used     crumpled up     discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman's face.

A Black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he'd been taught
was a manly thing to do
his teachers ripped out his eyes
his sex     his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson     celebrating
in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.

IV

"If earth and air and water do not judge them who are we
to refuse a crust of bread?"
Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl River     whistling
24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a ravished woman
and a white girl has grown older in costly honor
(what did she pay to never know its price?)
now the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment
and I can withhold my pity and my bread.

         "Hard, but not this hard."
Her face is flat with resignation and despair
with ancient and familiar sorrows
a woman surveying her crumpled future
as the white girl besmirched by Emmett's whistle
never allowed her own tongue
without power or conclusion
she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor
and a man with an executioner's face
pulls her away.

Within my eyes
flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain
a woman wrings her hands
beneath the weight of agonies remembered
I wade through summer ghosts
betrayed by visions
becoming dragonfish     surviving
the horrors we live     with
tortured lungs adapting
to breathe blood.

A woman measures her life's damage
my eyes are caves     chunks of etched rock
tied to the ghost of a Black boy
whistling     crying     frightened
her towheaded children cluster
little mirrors of despair
their father's hands already upon them
and soundlessly
a woman begins to weep.