Mr. West (3 page)

I know you believe angels are with you.
This was not your first car accident.

My grandfather was never in car accidents
though he was legally blind in one eye.

An instance of saving I failed to notice?

My grandfather believed. He looked at the stars as proof
long after he stopped going to synagogue.

Kanye understood his belief—“I think 50% because it was instilled in me.
That's what we call on.”

50% because you were saved?
What is it about being saved?

The best I know about saving is from childhood.
Jesus resurrected. Moses parting the sea. A Holocaust survivor.

Or one friend who refused to wear her seatbelt
because a relative lived when he didn't wear one.

Miraculous survival. Shock tumble through the air.
And I thought my friend was unreasonable.

I don't know how to be shaken,
to embrace a new belief,

but Kanye does
.

dear donda

  
  
  
  

KANYE WEST
, “Hey Mama,” line 17 of verse 1

ADVENTURES

5 year anniversary of Katrina already.

I remember Bush reading a story to a classroom of children and not leaving. The book upside down.

Do I want to believe that?

No, that was after the planes flew into the World Trade Center.

On NBC, Kanye spoke out. I watched this clip over and over. He looks like he's going to cry. He says, “George Bush doesn't care about Black people,” and they change who the camera's on.

They moved to Chris Tucker, stumbling over every scripted word.

Then, on ABC, an interview, “I'm working—I'm working off the cusp here. I'm working off the top of my mind. I'm not reading the teleprompter. I'm letting—I'm speaking from the heart, and that thing got dialed up and typed—typed into the heart. And that was that.”

“Do you think it was fair?” asked the interviewer. But that wouldn't be my first question.

How does your heart work?

What else in the body could be the teleprompter?

The internet winds around. Not too many links before I find an interview between Larry King and Dr. Jan Adams, the cosmetic surgeon who operated on Kanye's mother the day before she died.

Adams went on the show to formally announce that he would
not partake in the interview at the wishes of the West family.

I'm disgusted by him because I've begun to love
your mother.

I'm working in the darkness between her teeth. I'm
reading

the measurements of her skull which is an excuse
to put my fingers in her hair.

She dedicated a whole chapter of her memoirs,
Raising Kanye
, to what he said about Bush and Katrina, to their trip to Houston. They brought Halloween masks to the children. And fifteen furnished homes for fifteen families for one year.

Though no one reported on this. Not one Houston Chronicle article.

Kanye had said, in that NBC clip, “I've even
been shopping before

even giving a donation, so now I'm calling
my business manager

right now to see what's—what is the biggest
amount I can give.”

What is the biggest amount so that how
much remains?

I can't look up something like that.

A number I can't imagine.

After the earthquake in Haiti, Noah and I
donated $20 at Wegman's
and our cashier told us it was the largest
donation all day.

In one verse, in 2007, Kanye raps, “
  
  
,” and I would guess he dreams about Katrina.

About making a song, Kanye said, “I think about how people will react when they hear this. I think about how they will react to a certain point in the song. So, you know, a lot of time I try to build it up like an adventure.”

And he does. And they are.
And I can imagine the water beginning to enter the house.

KANYE'S CIRCULATORY SYSTEM

upon the two-year anniversary of the death of my grandfather Allen

The blood helps because the heart helps because the electricity moves us.

Kanye, my circulatory system looks like yours. So you too have a soft vein

too big for your temple, a pulse in your thumb. You're still losing your mother.

One reporter called your mother's death “
  
  
.”
I apologize for him. He thinks, maybe, two years is a long time.

Last year, in Princeton, I tutored a sixth grader in every subject. As he learned

the systems of the body, I did too, beginning with the diagram of the heart.

What new words did you learn then? What new procession of breath

did you practice when I was teaching a boy how to say vena cava and aorta,

when I drew hearts on a chalkboard for him, day after day, and erased,
with my finger, the holes for the pulmonary veins to come in, to

fill the left atrium with the blood we could not draw? You recorded a song.

I'd love if you'd recorded a song. I almost forget again that your heart

looks like mine. You've heard the pulse in your ears then. You know
wush
is not a foolish way to describe it. You miss her and I miss him but

surely I cannot say if, when you think of death, you, Kanye, think of the heart.

I WANT A HOUSE TO RAISE MY SON IN

1

I feel common.
There are people who want the house I want.

And if my desires are not unique,
what is?

A combination of my desires and my face
and the mud in the yard I don't yet have?

2

It's the worst time to be feeling this way,
when my legs are getting caught
on chairs and other places
I try to leave.

My hips just aren't able to hold myself
together anymore, so ready to bear

his terrible head—as when terrible
was used to describe God and Godly
everything.

3

I can hardly make it through.
Sleep comes and bends
my hands into positions of habit,
pinching the fluids that should move
like little fish through my wrists,
and shit. Shit. If I were my hand,
I'd be drowned. My hand is one
more part of me, maybe the last,
to realize I'm deathly ill, in that,
I could die from this.

4

I have made Noah promise he will save me over the boy
if it came to that.

I've told no one this.

It is my one non-maternal act, my one feeling
that reminds me of the selfish child I was
when I thought how I would have spit and peed
on the Torah if I'd been a child in the Holocaust,
if it would have saved me,
which, only as an adult do I understand,
could not have saved me.

I think I will be damned, killed, struck,
for not only admitting these betrayals,
but writing them down.

I'm afraid I will be a horrible mother because
I am a horrible woman.

5

Can I write anything after that?
Can the poem continue?
Can I return to my love for my son?

Can I tell how I imagine burying my nose
in his soft, small belly,
how I imagine making him the best room,
the best crib and chest of drawers?

One day we will redecorate his room as
he wants. And we
will play basketball in the driveway

at the house—
the house I want so badly for him.

6

I lie in bed, as I can hardly leave it now,
and read books about Kanye. I page through
the one about Kanye's Glow in the Dark tour.
It reminds me of my son's bones, glowing white
in ultrasounds, in a more wretched darkness.

Donda made it seem easy in her memoir.
To love Kanye. To unconditionally love him.
She even knew he was a boy. In utero.

My son remains my mystery.
The ultrasounds revealing him
well-formed. No clubbed foot.
Black stomach means he can
swallow. Black bladder means
his kidneys are working. Heart

can be seen in detail, valves,
deep inside me. His hair grown.
His nose like mine. Arms, legs,
moving. Everything moving.

7

I want to lie in the grass of my yard with my son.
Every part of him in the sun. Every part of each of us.

ON NOVEMBER 10TH, 2007, DONDA WEST DIED

On November 10th, 2008, you were between shows. November 9th, Dublin, Ireland. November 11th, London, England.

By ferry and car, the journey from Dublin to London takes about eight hours.

By plane, about an hour.

I have to imagine you flew. But maybe not. Maybe you spent two hours, three hours, on a ferry.

The journey between two points is such a straight line.

Maybe you needed to be on the Irish Sea. The blue of it. The blue looks miserable.

The very shape of the sea is like a face, mourning, gagging on a moan.

And it must be salty, like all seas.

Though for a sea to leave cliffs instead of beaches.

That tells me it's killed its fair share of mothers.

The Irish stop clocks at the time of death. They stay with the body day and night until the burial. They recite poems. They sing. They cry and drink. They kiss the dead body.

Given the autopsy, at least some of these, you were unable to do.

But the first anniversary of a death. I know it.

We sometimes burn a
yahrzeit
candle. It burns for 24 hours, or 26, or 3 days, more. It's white and burns in a tall glass so you don't have to worry about leaving an open flame over night.

Do you worry about your house burning down?

You spent the nights around the anniversary of your mother's death on a stage that looked like the universe.

Planets. Shooting stars. A galaxy—pink and perfect.

You were glowing in the dark. And you were black in the dark.

And a monster came on stage to eat you.

To gobble you up. As mothers say.

DEAR DONDA

1

I wonder what you would think, seeing the dead white women in Kanye's “Monster” music video.

I wonder what you would think of me, vitreous, near translucent in my skin.

When you thought of white women, I wonder if you thought of
Under
the Tuscan Sun
.

2

This isn't the time for a racist joke.
It's my fear coming out.
That I'm growing to be a worthless voice.

3

I had a professor who read an early draft of “Kanye's Skeletal System.”

He didn't believe you would hold Kanye's face, not because he was hurt, but because

you weren't a caring woman. Something about how much money you had,

something about dying after plastic surgery.

My giant belly in front of me made it easier to sit and fight
than leave the room.
You're being racist
.
And I told him you had a PhD in English. I knew he'd be surprised,
but I wish I hadn't told him.

So many worthwhile women in this world.

Black or not. Mother or not. Rich or not. Plastic surgery or not. Dead or not.

4

Another man tells me I haven't made enough of your death.

Well, I miss you, the idea of you I can carry around after reading
“
  
  
.”

That's all I have to say about it.

When I wanted to put my fingers in your hair, I wasn't saying,
Can I
touch it?

I was saying caress.

RUNAWAY

On Kanye West's website is a still frame from his movie—Kanye carrying a woman from an explosion filled with as many pinks as yellows and oranges (and a red like a flaming heart, if a burnt thing reddened, if light were pushed through the skin).

Just below it, there's a Twitter feed. It shows three tweets at a time. Any tweet hashtagged with

Runaway, runaway, RunAway, etc.

The first tweet when I visit today:

“I txt my Mom & told her I love her, she said I coulda came downstairs to say that… I dnt think she noticed I was gone LMFAO! #RunAway”

I didn't understand at first. So literal. So misplaced. She had actually run away. From her mother.

And she was laughing about it.

As if,
in front of Kanye.

aftermath

… taking a 15 second blip the mdeia have successfully painted the image of the “
ANGRY BLACK MAN
' The King Kong theory.

KANYE WEST
on Twitter, 6:22 a.m., Sept. 4, 2010,
via web; retweeted by 100+ people

THREE MONTHS, TO THE DAY, BEFORE
TAYLOR TURNED TWENTY, BUT KANYE

I'm not mad. I read on your site about how you spoke to Taylor's mother, heard your mother in her. You used over forty exclamation marks and I think that's how America needs to be spoken to. America can be found pining for you in her bedroom. Your hair like an Aztec god's. Your biceps like the end of days. This moment, on YouTube, viewed millions of times. Taylor's little ketchup mouth.

I could see that Beyoncé had to smile.      Even I could see that.

AFTERMATH

The world that opened,
as if Kanye were Hades and Taylor, Persephone,
and we all believed in the Greek myths and traveled back
in time to save her, to have our say, shake a fist.

I mean, everyone, just everyone, asks if I'll write a poem
about the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.

What deep hole in the Earth is this?

HATE FOR KANYE

As found on:
youtube.com/watch?v=9d8S_9PZ56M
, a clip (viewed 6,305,621 times) about the Taylor Swift incident.

Comments time-stamped as of 5:30 pm on November 7, 2010 (over a year after the incident).