Eugene B. Redmond

Distance

I am still on fire.

The flames in my veins and heart
Boil blood and burn hissing-hot.

Yet my time is inched on
By the realization of each new
Gleam-in-a-father's-eye.

My wrinkled oval sacks
Have pumped up a sea of come
Up through a mercenary-muscle
Into vaginas, wet towels and mouths.
But each sapping of the glistening love-sauce
Creates a new supply
Like the Phoenix Bird that rises from its own ashes.

More and more, like James Brown,
I find myself saying "I used to .... there was a time."

The mind grows younger and remembers:
The poetic but unprophetic words of my grandmother
as she played
Tick-tack-toe on my butt with an ironing cord:
"You little black bastard; Nigger, you won't live to be 21
With your mannish tail";
Parking piously in the park to finger-fuck and poke pussy
after dark;
Coming three times-in-a-row;
Crawling through wives' windows;

Palating pills, inhaling hashish, sucking syrup,
And gurgling O'Grady in a 1-2-3-4 fashion.

The items mount memory's totem pole:
The wild gossip of Lady Day;
The trips of Yard Bird;
The passion and elegance of Mr. B;
The legacy of Chano Pozo;
The hum of Midnighters,
Drifters,
Coasters
And Orioles;
The mood, mind and myths of Miles.

A single life,
A daily diet of death and
Under the bludgeoning of the slave drivers call
I am bound and thrown
At the feet of a white Christ
Where vultures stab and snap with putrid beaks at my
eye balls.

I now know distance and dread:
rivers and voices
freedom in a cage
freedom in a cage

Distance calls. In my secret soul heroes have always been
Black.
But America raised me on
John Wayne

Shirley Temple
And Tarzan.

America gave me distance!
America gave me distance!

Now, while I am still on fire,
I ache in anger to get home.

Walking One Day in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
(Saturday, July 3, 1971)

Walking one day in Baton Rouge,
Fresh shrimp frying in my head,
The wind, suddenly, gored me
In my tracks and pressed me
Against a wall of stiff air --
And, then, she was there!
Her presence an oakhold,
An ache, a gnaw, an admonishment:
Sweet teethbared arrogant
Spiritt held out like a lance of hardest steel
Or a shield of wry smiles;
This presence an impaled beauty,
An impartial stare:
And me -- with my need of nail -
Wanting to hit so hard it hurt.
Here in this flamespace,
This selfdisintegrating daydream,
Ay teeth and tongue boiling in butterflavored spit,
Windwalls so thick so thrustful:
And me -- with my need of nail --
Wanting to hit so hard it hurt.
And the wind, treasonous and triumphant,
It pressed me to my tracks - like a quicksand
Of slowsuction:
And me -- wanting to hit so hard it hurt.

GRANDMOTHER

She is a child
Whose dark eyes no longer
Divine the hidden fever
Or fathom rough lies
On a little black face.

Sullen walls
Are now haunted by stained
Portraits of Christ,
The dusty monuments
To her silent desertion.

A pair of callous knees
Record four-score years
Of daily soliloquies.
Chanted into
An arch of scaly hands.

And she unstops no more
The choked sewer
In the sunken street;
Nor sandbags in the rain
Mud threatening the four o'clocks.

Muscles that used to saw
And fashion logs into quilt-trees
Now sag

Like her long since
Shrunken breasts

She is a strange child at 86;
Who rekishes the taste of peppermint
and the somber hum of spirituals

© 1991/2004 by Eugene B Redmond

Cover Design: Joseph McNair