“Morning’s Avalanche of Light” is at once an elegy and a conjuring of the complex craft that was Danielle Legros Georges’s profound gift—as poet, as seer, as editor, as translator, as friend. Wishing to speak with her is the desire that shapes the field of the poem, its listening and its languaging. What I hope it honors, by way of conversation and chorus, is the beautiful genesis and clarity of her song—she, our ancestor now.
Morning’s Avalanche of Light
in memoriam Danielle Legros Georges
*
in dusk’s bronze drapery we dwelt
in the divinity
of our voice one spiritbody not close
nor far but horizon
-less scars of aphasia
light’s stenographer appeared in her touch
& “I” was a floating verb
the root being relative the spirit
being plural
the indefinite hidden in time’s
fastidious de
-marcations you could’ve said sky’s
tourniquet was the parading
of clouds flashing phosphorescence
in your brow
anciently we sang you said the silences
of our truth
*
inviting us into ancestors’ songs
you could see
what she said she saw lateday light
aswirl in whose gaze
was difference within itself the passions
of Empire’s in
-dex brutal the appeal of our Othering
re vived & re versed
thru lungs split by cross roads across what fields
ranging across the whole of you
the weight of us whose years the in
-terminable leaf of us
“I give you” compounds their sentience
& gift
*
the inner-known outer-place what wing
auroras
stanzas of memories echoes of gowns
like holes waves’d made
of stone phantom blades of our nativity
as if the speakers
were speaking thru blunt to the song
of their vanishing
creased by whose years within themselves
in
-between’s ecstatic mis direction breath’s
immanence
we’d parse skidding un housed
on what winds pulled into shrine house you’d
made
language rent creole rent lives that were or are
touch
*
it’s what you wouldn’t’ve been kept from
the harder sovereign state of limbo at Huracán’s
edge the “you” tangled within
the body of clerical blue
& glacial departed selves & shores Atlantics
deposited in books & bloodlines pre
-occupy our fragments of arrival
& you had come as raised presence radiance
in the void of the veil you sailed
to the corners of the page
where vowel & green mountain meet
cathedral of trees that solemnly reach beyond
the “I” you who un make
lying there in passages clear water’s somatic
embrace when hadn’t we arrived there deciphering
“I” who grieve & “I” who won’t dis
remember antecedent to
& mirroring torn things & masks we,
hooded emblems
of sky
Keith Jones teaches in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston and is the author of Echo’s Errand (Black Ocean, 2022) and the poetry chapbooks Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat (Pressed Wafer, 2012), the lucid upward ladder (Verse, 2015), Fugue Meadow (Ricochet, 2015), blue lake of tensile fire (Projective Industries, 2017), and shorn ellipses (Agape, 2017). His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Harvard Review, sx salon, Transition Magazine, Verse, and elsewhere. His most recent manuscript, titled Las Palmas, won the 2023 Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry Contest and is forthcoming from Omnidawn Press.