how you can’t be beholden to the mediocre
for your very intestines are echo chambers
of dreams swallowed under an umbrella of whips.
In the cavern of a kiss, how easily things slide
to the back of the mind – gone, your father’s lessons
on how to fondle fruit, to tease the tender skin
with fingers to fathom the ephemeral line
between ripe and rotten, so you are lost, tumbling
in a vortex of broken promises, guilt trips
and misused savings. This is what becomes of your heart
just before it breaks and you begin to claw back
yourself:
your blood is hybrid; your tongue is mongrel,
you carry songs of refuge – refugee mysteries
in the loom of Maroon shanties that shift language;
your father has been taken, his own father gone,
father upon father, across borders echo
and the sea waves back; your skin is weather beaten
and it absorbs sun, hatred, fire and shea butter –
it doesn’t crack. Summertime and you’re still living;
pick up your pieces by the only light that still
glows – the fading flower of your mother’s smile.
iv
My daughter dives, clean as a lemongrass blade
cut into water and something in her, some sheen
of worry is extinguished as her long arms brush
what was still into acceleration. She comes
alive, her head bobbing in and out between breaths.
My mother’s shoulders unfurl in her butterfly
strokes, my father’s limbs contract every time she turns.
She is calm – luminous in a way I am not
when I swim; I find my release in word and song
instead, knowing sometimes the precise tune I crave
and what souvenirs it carries. Entire affairs
live with me in this way, in gaps between horn solos,
the catch in Ella’s voice before Satchmo’s
refrain
. :
One day my daughter will remember,
as I did when she was born, a long-buried song
that emerges in snippets, swaddled in memory
if you ask me
I could write a book...
nkɛ bo baa ya
nkɛ bo baa ya da daa...
then a melody too
she has forgotten the words for, but flowers still
beneath her lips.
A baby cries, its mouth
a dark, dried fruit, and from somewhere
your entire inheritance of comfort comes
tumbling forth: heartbeat, caress, the first
words that stilled the waters
when you entered the world:
kaa fo.
v
Sometimes a man wakes with Spanish phrases
in his head, with no clear reason beyond a few
hours spent in Madrid, Lima and Buenos Aires.
There is no hand on his chest, no man or woman
calling from another room to ask what he will have
with his coffee, no skin-borne memory of caresses
just
mala hierba, which is a snippet of something
overheard and hablemos de la sensualidad
which he can only imagine is the fruit of a history
of building languages from scraps gathered
in the crowds and markets of Accra, Kumasi,
Cape Coast and Manila: Twi, Ewe, Tagalog, Fantsi.
There might be yet more in the bud
of his heritage: with a great-gran from Fernando Po
and others retrieved to the mother continent
from Guadeloupe, Nova Scotia, Jamaica...
who can ever tell what words he will scream
should he wake and find his head
replaced with flowers, his eyes stamens,
his cheeks a mesh of petals, pollen scattering
every time he speaks.
vi
You learn a thing from one lover, use it on another
and he can tell, like she can tell, some frisson
has shifted, some odd flavour lingers
in the fruit of your release.
The question will be asked
later, when seasons have passed and sunflowers gone
to seed, why you lied about it, why you tried
to juggle with the face of a clown,
creep with an elephant’s step.
Was there no father to whisper to you
at dawn which seed belonged to which plant,
which plant to which seed? No mother
to tutor your mouth to speak its desires
kindly, to tell you your heart does not belong
to the hand that caresses your breast?
By then, no answer will return
the body’s unquestioning surrender
or the harvests of swaying sorghum,
yam (its mounds so difficult to master),
cocoa and the wild hibiscus so trendy now
in West African bars. But know this:
you will always be loved. You will find
your heart does not need the flint
of broken promises to blossom into flame.
vii
One child I planted tomatoes with
because for a time there was a patch
of gardening space and sun; another
spoke beautifully with my tongue,
his eyes set in his grandfather’s face;
a third held me by the mouth
kissed me, caressed my cheek
and said Daddy, making my heart
thud at dawn each time I remember.
There are songs I have sung to all
my children, words I stole from tunes
shaped in the mouth of my mother.
Thus the body is echo chamber
and memory; all its parts triggers,
every bruise history, melody.
I carry all my dreams; not as I imagined,
but the heft holds – every flower has
fallen to yield some peculiar fruit.
viii
Absence is silence he has learned
to endure, but sometimes it breaks
his faith in his own existence, makes him
rephrase questions: if a tree falls in a forest
and you don’t hear it do you exist? Maybe
this is why he hums against the wood
of his own headboard, why it is no surprise
that Amazing Grace is the song
an agnostic chooses
to learn
to play
on his
new
trumpet.
Because it has history that will see him
past the clumsy blasts of air
he tries to tame into something
more than a noise, something
recognisable, something
he has heard his mother sing before
with notes his father played – words alive
in the hymn book that survived
his grandmother; a chain that holds them
all, a link that keeps everyone present
in his struggle – free as wind, breath.
One day his children will laugh at him
when he stumbles demonstrating a somersault
and falls with the thud of soft fruit in the morning.
He will chase them in mock fury and try again
and soon he will find ways of teaching them
things he can no longer do himself, like seed
begat bud and bud, flower – a chain unbroken.
Even talents that have slept within him like French
double Ls, alleles in the helix of his life,
he will pass on, easy as the caress that stripped
their mother’s body, simple as a song
that beyond silence
lives on.
ix
If I speak now of day’s orange retreat and the lily
white of a moon’s rise, it is because
one dusk a kayak will lick the face
of Lake Volta, slick as a boat that once glided,
a man in its belly, towards the flower
of Guadeloupe. In
