Jimmy's Blues (4 page)

Each time Desire looked towards Love,

hoping to find a witness,

Guilt shouted louder

and shook them hips

and the fire of the cigarette

threatened to bum the warehouse down.

Desire actually started across the street,

time after time,

to hear what Love might have to say,

but Guilt flagged down a truckload

of other people

and knelt down in the middle of the street

and, while the truckload of other people

looked away, and swore that they

didn’t see nothing

and couldn’t testify nohow,

and Love moved out of sight,

Guilt accomplished upon the standing body

of Desire

the momentary, inflammatory soothing

which seals their union

(for ever?)

and creates a mighty traffic problem.

Death is easy.

One is compelled to understand

that moment

which, anyway, occurs

over and over and over.

Lord,

sitting here now,

with my boy with a toothache

in the bed yonder,

asleep, I hope,

and me, awake,

so far away,

cursing the toothache,

cursing myself,

cursing the fence

of pain.

Pain is not easy;

reduces one to

toothaches

which may or may not

be real,

but which are real

enough

to make one sleep,

or wake,

or decide

that death is easy.

It is dreadful to be

so violently dispersed.

To dare hope for nothing,

and yet dare to hope.

To know that hoping

and not hoping

are both criminal endeavours,

and, yet, to play one’s cards.

If

I could tell you

anything about myself:

if I knew something

useful – :

if I could ride,

master,

the storm of the unknown

me,

well, then, I could prevent

the panic of toothaches

If I knew

something,

if I could recover

something,

well, then,

I could kiss the toothache

away,

and be with my lover,

who doesn’t, after all,

like toothaches.

Death is easy

when,

if,

love dies.

Anguish is the no-man’s-land

focused in the eyes.

Although you know

what’s best for me,

I cannot act on what you see.

I wish I could:

I really would,

and joyfully,

act out my salvation

with your imagination.

Although I may not see your heart,

or fearful well-springs of your art,

I know enough to stare

down danger, anywhere.

I know enough to tell

you to go to hell

and when I think you’re wrong

I will not go along.

I have a right to tremble

when you begin to crumble.

Your life is my life, too,

and nothing you can do

will make you something other

than my mule-headed brother.

My country,

t’is of thee

I sing.

You, enemy of all tribes,

known, unknown, past,

present, or,

perhaps, above all,

to come:

I sing:

my dear,

my darling,

jewel

(
Columbia, the gem of

the ocean!)

or, as I, a street nigger,

would put it—:

(Okay. I’m
your
nigger

baby, till I get bigger!)

You are my heart.

Why

have you allowed yourself

to become so
grinly
wicked?

I

do not ask you why

you have spurned,

despised my love

as something beneath you.

We all have our ways and

days

but my love has been as constant

as the rays

coming from the earth

or the sun,

which you have used to obliterate

me,

and, now, according to your purpose,

all mankind,

from the nigger, to you,

and to your children’s children.

I have endured your fire

and your whip,

your rope,

and the panic from your hip,

in many ways, false lover,

yet, my love:

you do not know

how desperately I hoped

that you would grow

not so much to love me

as to know

that what you do to me

you do to you.

No man can have a harlot

for a lover

nor stay in bed forever

with a lie.

He must rise up

and face the morning sky

and himself, in the mirror

of his lover’s eye.

You do not love me.

I see that.

You do not see me:

I am your black cat.

You forget

that I remember an Egypt

where I was worshipped

where I was loved.

No one has ever worshipped you,

nor ever can: you think that love

is a territorial matter,

and racial.

oh, yes,

where I was worshipped

and you were hurling stones,

stones which you have hurled at me,

to kill me,

and, now,

you hurl at the earth,

our mother,

the toys which slaughtered

Cain’s brother.

What panic makes you

want to die?

How can you fail to look

into your lover’s eye?

Your black dancer

holds the answer:

your only hope

beyond the rope.

Of rope you fashioned,

usefully,

enough hangs from

your hanging tree

to carry you

where you sent me.

And, then, false lover,

you will know

what love has managed

here below.

My progress report

concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom

is discouraging.

I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.

Furthermore, it appears

that I packed the wrong things.

I thought I packed what was necessary,

or what little I had:

but there is always something one overlooks,

something one was not told,

or did not hear.

Furthermore,

some time ago,

I seem to have made an error in judgment,

turned this way, instead of that,

and, now, I cannot radio my position.

(I am not sure that my radio is working.

No voice has answered me for a long time now.)

How long?

I do not know.

It may have been

that day, in Norman’s Gardens,

up-town, somewhere,

when I did not hear

someone trying to say: I love you.

I packed for the journey in great haste.

I have never had any time to spare.

I left behind me

all that I could not carry.

I seem to remember, now,

a green bauble, a worthless stone,

slimy with the rain.

My mother said that I should take it with me,

but I left it behind.

(The world is full of green stones, I said.)

Funny

that I should think of it now.

I never saw another one like it—:

now, that I think of it.

There was a red piece of altar-cloth,

which had belonged to my father,

but I was much too old for it,

and I left it behind.

There was a little brown ball,

belonging to a neighbor’s little boy.

I still remember his face,

brown, like the ball, and shining like the sun,

the day he threw it to me

and I caught it

and turned my back, and dropped it,

and left it behind.

I was on my way.

Drums and trumpets called me.

My universe was thunder.

My eye was fixed

on the far place of the palace.

But, sometimes, my attention was distracted

by this one, or that one,

by a river, by the cry of a child,

the sound of chains,

of howling. Sometimes

the wings of great birds

flailed my nostrils,

veiled my face, sometimes,

from high places, rocks fell on me,

sometimes, I was distracted by my blood,

rushing over my palm,

fouling the lightning of my robe.

My father’s son

does not easily surrender.

My mother’s son

pressed on.

Then,

I began to imagine a strange thing:

the palace never came any closer.

I began, nervously, to check

my watch, my compass, the stars:

they all confirmed

that I was almost certainly where I should be.

The vegetation was proper

for the place, and the time of year.

The flowers were dying,

but that, I knew,

was virtual, at this altitude.

It was cold,

but I was walking upward, toward the sun,

and it was silent, but—

silence and I have always been friends.

Yet—

my journey’s end seemed

farther

than I had thought it would be.

I feel as though I have been badly bruised.

I hope that there is no internal damage.

I seem to be awakening

from a long, long fall.

My radio will never work again.

My compass has betrayed me.

My watch has stopped.

Perhaps

I will never find my way to the palace.

Certainly,

I do not know which way to turn.

My progress has been

discouraging.

Perhaps

I should locate the turning

and then start back

and study the road I’ve travelled.

Oh, I was in a hurry,

but it was not, after all,

if I remember,

an ugly road at all.

Sometimes, I saw

wonders greater than any palace,

yes,

and, sometimes, joy leaped out,

mightier than the lightning of my robe,

and kissed my nakedness.

Songs

came out of rocks and stones and chains,

wonder baptized me,

old trees sometimes opened, and let me in,

and led me along their roots,

down, to the bottom of the rain.

The green stone,

the scarlet altar-cloth,

the brown ball, the brown boy’s face,

the voice, in Norman’s Gardens,

trying to say: I love you.

Yes.

My progress has been discouraging.

But I think I will leave the palace where it is.

It has taken up quite enough of my time.

The compass, the watch, and the radio:

I think I will leave them here.

I think I know the road, by now,

and, if not, well. I’ll certainly think of something.

Perhaps the stars will help,

or the water,

a stone may have something to tell me,

and I owe a favor to a couple of old trees

And what was that song I learned from the river

on one of those dark days?

If I can remember the first few notes

Yes

I think it went something like

Yes

It may have been the day I met the howling man,

who looked at me so strangely.

He wore no coat.

He said perhaps he’d left it at Norman’s Gardens,

up-town, someplace.

Perhaps, this time, should we meet again, I’ll

stop and rap a little.

A howling man may have discovered something I should know,

something, perhaps, concerning my discouraging progress.

This time, however,

hopefully,

should the voice hold me to tarry,

I’ll be given what to carry.

No, I don’t feel death coming.

I feel death going:

having thrown up his hands,

for the moment.

I feel like I know him

better than I did.

Those arms held me,

for a while,

and, when we meet again,

there will be that secret knowledge

between us.