Maybe the Saddest Thing (2 page)

playing rough beneath your skirt. How

raw you must be. To sit before a camera,

legs uncrossed.

When I think of you

it is always of a small, locked room.

A principal's dark, full lips

pressed together in a smirk. A glare

from his fat, gold herringbone chain

burning tears in my eyes, my face

red as yours in direct sunlight. And

even as my voice shut down

that day, I knew ditching

to buy *NSYNC's CD

was worth more than

Prescriptive Speech class.

What I heard: four voices

harmonized in a plastic bottle.

Your falsetto, blowing the top off.

Michael Jackson

with no abusive boxer father

or snatched childhood.

Sam Cooke

sans German shepherds

stalking through his songs.

I've been watching James Brown

and Jackie Wilson make

pelvic fixation public domain

since I was old enough

to work a remote. And I have yet

to elude starched lines. How did you

learn to dance your way out of boxes?

Or did you

find it easy as breathing, like whistling

the national anthem?

Do you remember the Super Bowl?

How you tore Janet Jackson's breast

from her top?

I love you that way.

Her earth-brown bounty of flesh—

large, black nipple

pierced, wind chapped, hardened.

And you saying, Go ahead. Look.

Dearest Pam,

I still dream of you.

College. Our second date.

How the ceiling fan would not cure

my fever that day, the white walls

beaded in sweat. I could have killed

my white friend for walking in on us.

Or kissed him right there in the dorms.

Damn the smoldering Newport cherry

that bathed my room in red. And you

cocking back that cold, hard Glock

against Samuel L. Jackson's dick.

My white friend and I, we could have

unzipped in front of the TV screen

and wrestled for the tube of Lubriderm.

I don't know what scared me more:

my roommate's wood or the camera,

out of breath, climbing mountains—

those muscled, brown thighs.

How were we supposed to compete

with Sam? Richard Pryor? Or Kareem?

With any man on your list of lays?

My mother's answer:
fuck foreplay
—

the other Pam's bed-tanned
Baywatch

castmates taped to her teen son's wall.

For my thirteenth birthday she framed you

garnishing a large bed in red lingerie.

I'm sorry. I never hung your poster.

Even now I don't know how

to love you right. But I suspect I was

onto something back in middle school,

unsticking the other Pam

to make room for my present—

four walls. So blank

and unassuming.

When it comes, I won't even notice it.

I'll be too busy looking good.

—JIM KELLY, FROM
ENTER THE DRAGON

See a clumped baby-fro budding below

Enter the Dragon
's hyperbolic grunts

and you, unsheathing that samurai sword

from bulging, white bell-bottoms—slaying eight

flower dresses in one scene. Or strangling,

with plucked chest hairs, wide-open women cops.

Imagine: a black silk pajama shirt

blown open. A boy leering on the couch.

Now picture my mom, Delilah, with shears.

Mother sees you and thinks,
lothario
.

Will not hear that besting another man

ten-gallon-fro intact

is Western as a Marlboro Man ad.

But you know your business, Jim. I see you.

We used to angle our asses off.

Like, say Cindy the flautist's

blouse was see-through. Say

she was sporting a tight
Les

Misérables
camisole underneath.

We might hit her off with an

unexpected mixtape, all show

tunes and power ballads. We might

compare the lead actors' recurring

sparks to an echo. Might use this

tidbit to tongue a girl down

in the instrument closet. After

school, fully dressed, bodies

enmeshed like two wild-eyed

ravenous stars, expressing

their nature—barrel-roll style.

Saliva-heavy kisses, lips

smacking, rattling

snare bottoms. We jockstrap

gossip tweakers. I remember

asking Ashley to Spring Fling

because I'd heard

of her oral inclination.

We took notes, memorized

what worked on who. Rico

told me Ashley liked daisies.

I appealed to her inner kid

for weeks. Chased her

around the timpani, tickled

her midriff

with a feather marching plume.

Kept it on an innocent tip.

Until she got thirsty

at the dance.

We walked past punch bowls

to the main hall, held hands

as she drank from a fountain.

She made a left

at the make-out corridor

with droopy stems

stuck to walls.

I didn't even get to kiss her

face. I didn't know Rico

had followed us. Didn't know

he would jam Ashley's

hand down his pants. That

she'd slip her other palm

down mine. I didn't even

get to say Stop. Ashley,

I've spent 50 lines, 3,892

days flattering myself. Thinking

I'd used some next-level mind

game to get you

where, no, how, I wanted you.

But you sized me up

in under a minute. Examined

the stain just left of my fly.

& then you smirked,
I knew it
.

DETROIT, MICHIGAN

Obtuse red bolts cranked at each corner of the lot. Shirtless kids slapping hydrant-spray at largemouth-bass grins. Thin strands of water nearly blind Eastern Market cement. My wife, Jill, and I, we're in the thick of it, managing to overstep their runoff. Gum-popping teen lovers and elderly couples are weeds in aisles. Row after weedy-row they knock our hips together as we browse every pink beaded hollyhock, golden black-eyed Susan, and perky, white, perspiring snapdragon on display. We take an oblong tub of crimson clover and red poppy off a vendor's hands and I say the city is breathing. I prepare for a scene. Wait for her to miff our identical stride with a kiss and
Oh, baby! I always wanted to marry a walking poem!
Smiling, she reaches for my hand, locks her fingers for a moment, says
Yes. Yes, it sure is.

Mint, basil, thyme, and trout pot the breeze. Jill's pinched nose and lips twisted east and west say she's unsure of the aroma. She leads us to a corner bistro, plops her purse on a menu and I order Bloody Marys, no celery. A table between us, we smile awhile, talking about the garden we haven't sown. Beneath the table, we place our feet on one another's seats when hydrant-spray starts leaking against our tub. I look down to adjust her knotted gold anklet and sigh at a hummingbird, flapping near a cigar plant, in a banged-up plastic bed. She points just below the bird.
Well would you look at that butterfly go to town on those little pistils!
Jill. Oh, Jill. The things that woman sees.

The weight of last night's bloody rib eye, wine, and crème soufflé has guilted us into the gym. Jill's trying to take the StairMaster's title again, sweat spilling from her brow like rain beyond the entrance window—a speed which rivals a woodpecker knocking at a telephone pole, after months spent idle in a sparse-stumped clearing. She looks left, laughs, and I can't really blame her. What she sees is me cruising a stationary bike. Moisture has found my face. It begins at a glistening thigh palmed by spandex shorts. It ends in spittle dribbled down the chin. My mind is wandering Jill's upstairs lair, tripping over bottled water lining her cupboard. I'm thinking about mud particles, decayed twigs, and demolished earthworms distilled. I'm wondering what it takes to kill a thing's root. Beyond the sidewalk, dwelling in a sea of lawn, two Pekin ducks should be charged with lewd conduct. The larger, presumably male, bounces on the skinny one's rump to the storm's steady pulse. I try to smile at Jill but she's headphones-deep in another world. The rain turns, beats harder on the gym roof. The drake's wide orange bill begins to nip at the woman's head. Lightning welts the sky and he's pecking. Jill's high-stepping something awful. Thunder shakes the window. Someone's knocking wildly at someone's skull. I stop.

Could I call this poem an aubade if I wrapped it

in fragrant tissue paper? If I locked this morning

in the mind's safe-deposit box and polished it

sixty-six times per day, until a sky's description noted

the number of feathers on a sparrow's left wing

and the crabgrass jutting from his uppity beak?

I once wrote a poem about a fruit fly orgy

in a grape's belly. Its crescendoed combustion

was supposed to represent the speaker's feelings

for a wife named Joy. That poem never really

worked out. This poem is aware of its mistakes

and doesn't care. This poem wants to be a poem

so bad, it'll show you a young, smitten pair

poised in an S on a downy bed. The man inhales

the woman's sweet hair and whole fields

of honeysuckle and jasmine bloom inside him.

He inhabits a breath like an anodyne and I think

I could call this poem an aubade if it detailed

new breath departing his mouth. I think I could

get away with that. Because who knows what

that even means? Maybe I mean

that's safer than saying it straight

like, This is about the woman I'll marry.

How one summer, she hit snooze four times

each sunrise. This is about her smiling

and nodding off, and smiling, and listening

to me mumble into the back of her perfect

freckled shoulder about anything but poetry.

And this morning at my desk, in the midst

of a breath, I remember not every moment

needs naming. I know precisely what to call this.

All right, so not really. But the morning my pops found Kenny G lying on my nightstand I did learn a black father can and will enter a bedroom, only to find Kenny's CD, bad perm and all, cuddled too close to his eighth-grader's head. He will tiptoe from the room, turn the knob, then kick down the door in slippers. He'll drag the boy out of bed down two flights of stairs and toss him in front of a turntable. Listen here, he says. When you finish a record put it back in the sleeve and you better not scratch my shit.

I curl into a ball on our shag brown carpet and stare at his wall of LPs. Breakfast folds into lunch before I move an inch. When supper rolls around I am shaking. (This is how jazz begins. Out of hunger.) Getting to my feet, I pull a record from the shelf, read:
Black Talk!
Charles Earland. A needle collides into an empty groove and out sweats a funky wash of organ. It feels like the afro's voice, grinning from the record sleeve, has picked itself out in my gut.