santurce,
green
bay,
crete
*
we wandered over rivulet stone
smashed sun & sage
holding old epiphanies
sky purse cloud’s bellow
bevel
-ed at edges where mouth
& sunset make
or lapse abeyance
we drifted along side streets
curled boulders smooth
to lay us down
as pool
*
she’d often say minotaur wo
-ven serpent
blessed flower & gown
long tresses
horned vase & bullish hands
hard on evidence
of desires
in sequences un
met you walked thin strand
thick
Ananse your mother de camped
sleeping wrapped as an oasis
of ground
suspended stories as odysseys
as eyes stuck to you
seagirt & madness
governed but for thread threat’s
census so inner
I could paint when I saw you there
lustrous in dis avowal aban
-doned to the sacrifice
of thirst epithet stinging cigarette
& beer foam
the daughter of the daughter of
I see your enum
-erations nurse the son
that was not the son
not freeborn but bound to schism
& rank current figurines
in windswept grove
raked to mounds that hid
the function of
artifice lost sky lost web lost
mirror lost path
to the sea of our likenesses
not trail but derive
-d sacred tide charred & brittle
copy of a copy of
my father anamorphous knee fore
-arm shattered breast
-plate I can only see polis as body
cruel potency formed reddening wheel
-ed occulted shield
of sun
*
we danced antic beheaded ghosts
his mother swaddled him
in dis may plinth Phoenician
vowels he was
in his gradations superceded in
-scribed by thorns co
-agulant bear not blood
nor lament but inscription’s
wild elegy
soothsayer in his ancestral ward
out of time out of place out of body
you give to me poultice
almanac
hideblade boneash wreckage
-mask of bellicose air
*
of monstrous birth a monster
given which half savage? which thrown as tribute?
the remainder as victories of penalties in
upper rose of wing & veil
that ours illicit would but by deceit’s
wonderment grow
that we were melting in rooms attuned
to weather a shock of baby born
in crossroads & roar of empire abrasive stone
languid liquid light out of hardship
swallowed the star of us in us tapering
our own exilic anecdote taboo like orb
or atlas we echo within a topos
of emanations
you at the front door turning I too
walked the walk
refused the quandary of your vehicle
as she had as you had as I in the black-sail
of sacrifice did
letting you know I’d died clothes
pinned to morning light gown of destiny’s skin
skein of the mother you were
& didn’t have of the wife
who was daughter of a daughter’s
epic refusal borne to be of gift then barren
all the ties of strings of laces iron-wrought
bench
& the father in the guise of a bull bellowing
sword-in-hand
clutched at wielded pierced
*
it was he who must betray her
her weeping in thread
a loanword a lone pre figuration
the forests burned
ontological islands that couldn’t
escape themselves
adjunct to a cup of poison the plantation
& its deeds
& there a land inside our various mis
-becomings inundated amp-
utated in ways that seem
un befitting con toured
under neath within the sheath
of fragment shorn
serenity spiked teeth & inlaid maze
its body our body’s aporia
*
thin decades the palace pre deceased
I am the fourth ladder my daughter says
my ambulant climactic sojourn thru
rugged serrated night thru a congeries
of backlit wombs emitting forever phantoms
we still see the “I” of it seasick
& sea redundant “tell me what you think
you know” is land is up rooted air is
hymn is vibration riffed “we” oceans
of where we were diaspora diadem points
of light awaiting us we who played
the keys to doors to shattered glass to stone
that un absolves us its spirit carmine &
branch painted below eager window
& willow seed of basalt of hazards
formed of embroidered edge alluvial our crust
returning the water’s ripple & weaves
outlets of time griot in the backseat
singing us no way long way home
Keith Jones is the author of the poetry books and chapbooks Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat (Pressed Wafer, 2012), Fugue Meadow (Ricochet Editions, 2015), the lucid upward ladder (Verse, 2016), blue lake of tensile fire (Projective Industries, 2017), shorn ellipses (Morning House, 2017), and Echo’s Errand (Black Ocean, 2022). A scholar of African diasporic and multiethnic literatures, decolonial theory, critical pedagogy, and poetry and poetics, he teaches in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His scholarly essays have appeared or are forthcoming in MELUS, African American Review, and the Journal of Social Issues. He is also the Poet-in-Residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. His manuscript Las Palmas, from which the above sequence is drawn, won the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming from Omnidawn Press.