| Music | In the thick brushthey spend the hottest part of the day, soaking their hoovesin the trickle of mountain water the ravine hoardson behalf of the oleander. |
| Music | Storms are generous. Something so easy to surrender to, sitting by the window, and then you step out into the garden you were so bored of, |
| Music | —After Ana Mendieta Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold forest-fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate, shimmer, gleam lucero-light? Through the morning would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off— & by night would |
| Music | for Aja Sherrard at 20The portent may itself be memory. —Wallace StevensHow hard to carry scores of adults on your back,not look at them as carrions of need, the distressof what loyalty requires. This pain is |
| Music | for Bob Marley, Bavaria, November 1980 Here is the brilliant morning on a fishing boat, this is the dream a dying man has in midwinter, the world covered in light and shadow—he dreams of St. Ann’s |
| Music | For Frank X WalkerFXW: I don’t know how to swim Me: What?! FXW: There were no pools for Black Folk when I was coming up In sleep’s 3-D theatre: home,a green island surrounded by the blue of ocean. Zoom to the heart, see |
| Music | My neighbor to the left had a stroke a couple years ago. It didn’t look like he was going to make it, and then he made it. I’m watching him now from my window as |
| Music | —for a sixty-seven-pound nugget of Lake Superior copperfound in an Iowa cornfield Before the earliest flute was carved from a vulture’s wing, before we—what few we were— bowed to the moon, the balmy, secular night, you |
| Music | —Issa Rae Everybody Black is my hometown team. Everybody Blackdropped the hottest album of the year, easy. Everybody Blackis in this show, so I’m watching. Everybody Black is in this movie, |