Early Cinema by Elizabeth Alexander

Early Cinema

According to Mister Hedges, the custodian

who called upon their parents

after young Otwiner and young Julia

were spotted at the matinee

of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik

at the segregated Knickerbocker Theater

in the uncommon Washington December

of 1922, “Your young ladies

were misrepresenting themselves today,”

meaning, of course, that they were passing.

After coffee and no cake were finished

and Mister Hedges had buttoned his coat

against the strange evening chill,

choice words were had with Otwiner and Julia,

shame upon the family, shame upon the race.

How they’d longed to see Rudolph Valentino,

who was swarthy like a Negro, like the finest Negro man.

In The Sheik, they’d heard, he was turbaned,

whisked damsels away in a desert cloud.

They’d heard this from Lucille and Ella

who’d put on their fine frocks and French,

claiming to be “of foreign extraction”

to sneak into the Knickerbocker Theater

past the usher who knew their parents

but did not know them.

They’d heard this from Mignon and Doris

who’d painted carmine bindis on their foreheads

braided their black hair tight down the back,

and huffed, “We’ll have to take this up with the Embassy”

to the squinting ticket taker.

Otwiner and Julia were tired of Oscar Michaux,

tired of church, tired of responsibility,

rectitude, posture, grooming, modulation,

tired of homilies each way they turned,

tired of colored right and wrong.

They wanted to be whisked away.

The morning after Mister Hedges’ visit

the paperboy cried “Extra!” and Papas

shrugged camel’s hair topcoats over pressed pajamas,

and Mamas read aloud at the breakfast table,

“No Colored Killed When Roof Caves In”

at the Knickerbocker Theater

at the evening show

from a surfeit of snow on the roof.

One hundred others dead.

It appeared that God had spoken.

There was no school that day,

no movies for months after.

I Have Good News by Tony Hoagland

I Have Good News

When you are sick for the last time in your life, 

walking around, shaky, frail with your final illness, 

feeling the space between yourself and other people

grow wider and wider 

like the gap between a rowboat and its dock—

you will begin to see the plants and flowers of your youth.

And they will look as new to you as they did then—

little lavender bouquets arranged in solar systems 

delicate beyond your comprehension:

the dark gold buttons with the purple manes; 

the swan-white throat splashed with radish-colored flecks; 

the threadlike stalks that end in asterisks.

They are where you left them, by the bus stop bench; 

along the chain-link fence behind the widow's house. 

And you shall squat down on your heels

and gaze at them, just as you did before. 

Because this restitution of your heart is coming, 

you need not fear the indignities of death and growing old.

The synagogue of weed-head will be your evidence 

that every moment 

is not trampled by the march of all the rest.

It doesn't matter if you end up isolated and alone, 

pulling the trigger of the morphine feed 

repeatedly; it doesn't matter if you die

whimpering into the railing of the hospital bed, 

refusing to see visitors, 

smelling your own body in the dawn.

The dark ending does not cancel out 

the brightness of the middle.

Your day of greatest joy cannot be dimmed by any shame.

The traffic goes by on Shepard Avenue.

The honeysuckle vine braids in and out and in

the spokes of the abandoned bicycle.

The Poem Unwritten by Denise Levertov

The Poem Unwritten

For weeks the poem of your body, 

of my hands upon your body

stroking, sweeping, in the rite of

worship, going

their way of wonder down

from neck-pulse to breast-hair to level

belly to cock – 

for weeks that poem, that prayer

unwritten.

That poem unwritten, the act

left to the mind, undone. The years

a forest of giant stones, of fossil stumps,

blocking the altar.

About the Bees by Justin Phillip Reed

About the Bees

 

I do think of them

from time to time—

just now sucking the pulp

 

of a tangerine

the taste of which

is mostly texture,

 

in this spin-drunk season

that seems to forget

—us. —itself.

 

At the job I lost,

their husk carcasses

with the locust bean’s

 

cracked brown pods

rustled on the brick steps

leading into the white-walled

 

hours of computer screen;

their compressed toil

missing from the hives

 

they left agape in the backyard

of the next-door neighbor

who, recently divorced,

 

had brought us the jars

of honey I spooned into teas

I sipped in the break room

 

and watched at the window

as he continued to tend

the needle palm and hydrangea.

 

In the age of loss there is

the dream of loss

in which, of course, I

 

am alive at the center—

immobile but no one’s queen—

enveloped (beloved) in bees,

 

swathed in their wings’

wistful enterprise. They pry

the evolved thin eyelids

 

behind which I replay

the landscape as last I knew it

(crow feathers netting redder suns),

 

their empire’s droning edge

mindless in the spirals of

my obsolescing ears.

 

Beneath my feet

what kind of earth

I’m terrified to break

 

into sprint across to free

myself, to free them

from the myth they make

 

of me and then bury

below their dance

of manufactory;

 

what kind of future

they could die for if

punching into me their stings—

 

what future without risking

the same; and while, in either body

the buzzards of hunger conspire,

 

what kind of new

dread animal,

this shape we take?

The Red Poppy by Louise Glück

The Red Poppy

The great thing

is not having 

a mind. Feelings:

oh, I have those; they 

govern me. I have 

a lord in heaven 

called the sun, and open 

for him, showing him

the fire of my own heart, fire 

like his presence.

What could such glory be

if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, 

were you like me once, long ago, 

before you were human? Did you 

permit yourselves

to open once, who would never 

open again? Because in truth 

I am speaking now 

the way you do. I speak 

because I am shattered.

 

Eyes Fastened With Pins by Charles Simić

Eyes Fastened With Pins

 

How much death works,

No one knows what a long

Day he puts in. The little

Wife always alone

Ironing death's laundry.

The beautiful daughters

Setting death's supper table.

The neighbors playing

Pinochle in the backyard

Or just sitting on the steps

Drinking beer. Death,

Meanwhile, in a strange

Part of town looking for

Someone with a bad cough,

But the address somehow wrong,

Even death can't figure it out

Among all the locked doors . . .

And the rain beginning to fall.

Long windy night ahead.

Death with not even a newspaper

To cover his head, not even

A dime to call the one pining away,

Undressing slowly, sleepily,

And stretching naked

On death's side of the bed.