A. Van Jordan
Young, Homeless, and Black Threnody
Oakland, CA. corner of High St & MacArthur Blvd.
This world moves past me—cars, people, news of the day–
As a world moves within me, faith beyond my eyes.
People live, so to speak, on the streets of this city
In which I try living. If people’s concerns get stirred,
As this sista sits alert yet cool on the side of the road,
I don’t hear them; I see her gracile hands. This day
Distends a world within me, faith beyond my eyes.
She eats patiently from her hand, but her load-
Bearing stare catches me, and all my and this city’s lies
Get exposed, as she sits on the side of the road,
Her eyes lift, iridescent as they squint to say,
I see more than the stories about me you’ve been told.
Still, worlds move past me—the cars, the people, the day—
And little more than talk and whispers and pity
Pass between us. Our gaze locks. Our dimensions exposed.
Some say this is what’s wrong with the streets of this city,
But Mr. Cullen said it best: “She is nearer than the word
Wasted on her now,” So what, yeah, one of her titties,
Hangs exposed, and people’s concerns get stirred
By a blouse caught in a breeze, but she gives less fucks
Than Etheridge Knight. Let’s say, forget what you heard.
I don’t hear them; I see her gracile hands. This day.
Fourth Wall Arpeggio
Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so
out of character for me, but it’s not about my mother,
as much as it’s about how, as a son, the disease
measures the changing rituals of family.
And 28 lines–all I’ve provided myself–seems so
anemic. Now, I barely have 18 lines left for a love
I don’t have the vigor to describe. Reticence is a disease
I’ve suffered from throughout my life. Without family,
I don’t know what it means to live as myself, and, so,
I hide in the reflection of others, which, after all, others love:
People care more about themselves than a friend’s mother.
I mean, how does one explain to someone who’s not family
how you now see the patterns into which a parent would sew
a quilt to lay over a child, the child neither hip to love
nor Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices”? My mother’s
silence seems like indifference except I know the disease,
which changes our relationship, the parent and child; I must sow
healing from my memory of how she taught me to love,
not knowing her movement through a day as a mother,
as someone whose sole gig was to keep me alive, free of disease
and, whenever possible, embarrassment. But now, family
means playing the parent; I’m still just a son, writing about love,
but lowering my eyes from the trauma, I lift her body, my mother,
for a shower, straining under my adulthood and its disease.
My Mother’s Last Words to Me Arpeggio
Texts arrive and so do viral posts of the world on fire,
but I sit alone, trying to recall, the last words
my mother spoke to me before all this happened.
I listened to her speak, I’m sure, but did I hear
her? The message I was supposed to share with others
got lost somehow among the chatter, all the words
of friends telling me news of their day: what happened
at dinner last night or some song I had to hear
to believe. Well, now, I can’t focus on dances of others
while I scratch my head in thought. Let the fires
come. This is the world in which shit happens.
People lean in, ear to ground, teacup to wall to hear
without hearing. They peer into the lives of others
to understand their own loneliness. A fire
blazes, lives playing out on nitrate film, no words
just silent burning; there’s nothing beyond to hear.
The smoke comes from within, or from some other,
my mother, who spent years praying through my fiery
path to adulthood. What can I say? There’s no words
to explain my ignorance in my youth; happening
just was. What was it she said before Alzheimer’s othered
her into silence? I don’t recognize what that fire
behind her eyes tries to recall now, but I know the words
fill behind her tongue. So much stayed in play, happenings
and goings on, there in her voice. I can still faintly hear
her past the texts and viral posts of the world on fire
around me. My mother warned me this would happened.
This, her message, I was supposed to share with others.
A. Van Jordan
A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). His forthcoming book, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, will be released in June of 2023 (W.W. Norton & Co). He served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Literature at The University of Michigan, and he is currently the Humanities and Sciences Chair in English at Stanford University.