Sensed

       all shut-eye ain’t sleep; all good-bye ain’t gone – Gullah saying

First the boy, his color dark

as the night he is running in

still covered in muck to remove his scent, still

scampering among the undergrowth of palmetto and slash pine

then suddenly up a live oak

where his body folds to match a high twisted limb.

His breath held, he does not move nor does his story,

in fact, for two centuries the scene has been repeating itself.

The dogs are always fooled.

Ghost dogs, let loose, the same old pack,

their noses still scouting his scent, still running

into the same eerie swamp, always racing past the live oak

where the slave boy is hiding, still

continuing through the old grove with its dangling moss

going deep into mists where, finally, they

slow down, disappear.

Nothing ages. Not the place, the boy, nor dogs.

Nothing leaves because the boy has never left because

it takes awhile to erase a cruel history.

Behind the pack, apparitions, a group

of filmy-white men, long gone yet raised up with rifles,

the poorest of the low country, their mouths open

in the same angry shapes, still yelling,

it is their job you know, something

they are paid to do with their dogs

a language the wind has agreed to carry over

into this century, we hear it you know

sic ‘em, sic ‘em     that noise

coming like a hoard of insects

we keep brushing off.                                                                                                                            printable

Reading the Stones

       Bishops Beach – Homer, AK

In the journal I wrote of the beach half-frozen in middle March,

of walking its hardened surface, and the way of my walk,

the timeless strides, crossing the snow-covered sands to Kachemak Bay.

I wrote of the bay’s silvery current, the forming of small lips of water

and what they mouthed.

In the journal is a section about the cobbles, in the section, I tell

of so many stones, cold and black, shiny as patent leather.

There is mention as to why they were gleaming, that I thought it so

because of the tide which rose and receded, it washed over

leaving a film that iced instantly in the Alaskan air.

Nearing the end of the page is a line which reads: Above, the sun

burnt the beach bright, but the thin sheet

of the ice on the stones did not melt. And it was so.

All this I wrote, of the curling of water, of the shapes of the cobbles,

then added, but the look of them were beyond stones, more like beings

come ashore, gathered to talk with us as if they have something to say.

I had reached the end of the page at this point, and needed to turn it.

On page two, at the very top, I wrote once more of the water,

how when the Spring thaws the sea, the first waves are for drinking

because the salt sinks and the top is fresh. This, I learned in Alaska.

It was told to me and was true I could tell.

Think now what I understand.

Think of the pen moving hurriedly across the paper because the scenes rush

to the page sometimes, too fast for the hand.

Further on, are two paragraphs explaining how necessary it was

to be a little by myself, to stand in the shallows

becoming bright-eyed by the water’s edge.

I stood bundled in borrowed clothes, I wrote,

while the north wind I breathed

moved under my skin.

Of the stones … they appear time and again.

In one account, I pause over them staring as I would with meadow-flowers,

bent over, so very low, yielding to something hard to explain.

Something the stones held within them.

And this I wrote of, for I realized learning was a bodily thing.

On page three, I include an important story of The Real People,

which is the meaning of the word, Eskimo, and how

they considered the stones as oracles from the sea.

They could read the strands of white granite running through

as lines of luck and erotic messages. They could turn a stone belly up

and something was known from a single touch.

I began touching the stones and on page four I talk of this.

Whatever is realized is right, I wrote, and so we touch

that our eyes, our hands will know what the stones have given of themselves,

the white lines like paths for us

to follow their rocky truths.                                                                                                                        printable