Alabama Poets
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He was a complicated man. At least
that’s what I think he would have been saying to my great-great-great-great grandmother after stroking her hair a final time and standing over her spent body. This is always his excuse when she asks about the boy spending time with his father or her being allowed in the house when Fillmore visits in a few months. He tells her the most beautiful things have to live in darkness. He promises the most beautiful thing God ever made was the dark center of a mountain and he swears he’ll take her through a mountain one day and let her sit by the window and watch the world of Montgomery grow small behind her. “Wouldn’t that be sweet?” He never does wait for an answer before he leaves to check on the trains and the bodies dropped off by the trains for the Commerce Street auctions and the bodies whittled down to ghosts to keep the tracks in front of the trains. He leaves and I am left with nothing but my great-great-great-great grandmother and all the bright and blight-stricken universes growing inside of her. And even the worst poets know trauma travels through time so some of her and him have to be here with me. Now, I can blame someone for my love of the Trojan War because wealthy men always love horses and the beautiful poem says he gave the baby boy a wooden horse for a birthday gift and the boy never saw it as a trap until the boy cut his foot on a splinter and the cut leads to a fever that won’t stop burning through my bloodline. My love for Hector and Homer finally makes sense because the darkest part of my blood was teaching me to love rapists years before I discovered these names in the back of the family reunion pamphlet. And he had to be there, he had to be a proud white ghost in the room whenever I mentioned Caesar or Alexander or Charlemagne to make a room see me as something other than a black boy who could read Latin. He had to see me as more because he had to see me as his, and every master needs a servant who can prove his master’s glory. But the beautiful poem ends with love for my great-great-great-great grandmother. And the beautiful poem lets me hold her in the light and shame the sun for shining on a world that did to her what it did to her. And the beautiful poem would say that she shines through me when I learn to take all the spikes this country drives into me and transmute them into Orphic songs that wake the dead and pull the earth into a tear-streaked smile. But I’m afraid of her being most like me when I dream of black holes and how they are allowed laugh when they break free of every law man could ever name. She’s there when I pray to be less, when I pray for a name the earth will never catch on its tongue, a name never whispered in the dead of night, a name never drifted over whiskey stained lips. She’s there in my chest when I pray for a heart neither hand nor hope can grip. She’s there in the gentlest dusks when I pray to be reborn as a star who died before men could worry it with a wish. 
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