The Geez Read online

  The Geez

  POEMS

  Nii Ayikwei Parkes

  CONTENTS

  Game

  Of Language

  Offside

  Seeing Eyes

  Frankenstein

  Variables

  A Gimbal of Blackness

  Hangman

  Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow

  Of Serendipity

  Trumpet

  One Night We Hold

  Eros

  Bottle

  break/able

  Contiguity

  Travelling Solo

  Blowing Smoke

  How I Know

  Of Sides

  Locking Doors

  Year AD87: BM14

  A Concise Geography of Heartbreak

  Underbelly

  lenguaje

  Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ

  Dark Spirits

  Eaux

  Oscura y sus obras

  Caress

  yorkshire bath displays

  The Furnace

  Inheritance

  11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa

  Tree of the Invisible Man

  Defences

  sub.marine.blues

  Zest

  Our Love is Here to Stay

  Crossroad vs Blues

  Interpretation

  #Labour

  Moonwalk

  To Be In Love

  Casablanca

  Vogue

  Game

  Of Language

  It might have been one night celebrating

  a mother’s birthday in a Paris hotel room,

  or some breathless minutes at the in-laws’

  whispering like experimenting teenagers – still,

  out of the fifty-thousand scent memory we have

  there is now the smell of a baby girl, one born

  in a war zone less equipped than Syria

  but, for a child at the front lines, perhaps

  just as damaging as time unravels. You are

  her father; she is a cheeky, fragile joy,

  but, because you love her, you must leave.

  A coin tosses endlessly in your head; sleepless

  nights have your heart torn and off-kilter.

  You wrestle your selfish urges, find strength

  to walk away. You know it is right,

  but you have never known pain like this

  and how can a suckling baby understand why

  a shadow inhabits the space that was her

  father? Except, your first time alone with her,

  after she has left her mother’s arms, she holds

  you doesn’t.let.go for the longest time.

  Offside

  Because I know about green mangoes

  more than I know about any woman

  I teach my sister about boys, how to

  think like one, play one step ahead.

  I tell her not to step back, any time

  they lunge forward, but to side-step,

  stay focused, show no fear; I show her

  the same thing works in football, before

  the age of positions, they rush like dogs;

  that’s when you pass and move, hold on

  for a minute, then accelerate. Speed

  combined with timing, like a good joke,

  and you have beaten the offside trap.

  I teach her to punch too, and for good

  measure, where. By sixteen maths is play

  for her, she has boys rapt for her punch

  lines, waiting, hoping for a chance to slip

  a line of their own in. She foils them

  all. Years later when she has settled,

  done her 38 weeks, I get the call. I am told

  It’s a boy. It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy!

  Seeing Eyes

  Pretending I can’t find my bi yoo bibioo

  simply because she has covered her eyes

  gives her as much joy as the silly faces

  I sometimes pull. Out of the 43 facial muscles

  I should have, I stretch, contract, contort,

  conjure shapes that get the desired reaction.

  But when she hides she is in control – even

  ridicules me for not seeing her: I’m right

  here, Daddy, she screams, then runs to hug me.

  Already the time is coming when the trick will be

  too old. I know so well how soon our pleasures go.

  I recall hiding from my grandma. Her dark eyes

  imprisoned behind cataracts, I was always stunned

  how easily she found me. She didn’t even move;

  she just pointed, and my reaction was always – How?

  Some quality of those hours with her is how I see God:

  something of her certainty that I had my late father’s

  physiognomy just from the sound of my voice; how

  she hugged this inherited body, this borrowed

  shape and hue, close to her, cradled its shifting

  face, seeing and loving a grandchild with no eyes.

  Frankenstein

  You know that Kareem Abdul Jabbar hook

  shot, right? Drexler’s glide, Pippen knocking

  the ball away from someone’s control to send it

  up to Air... Something you could always count on

  when things got rough. That was Victor for us;

  the opponent’s worst enemy. He came on

  when games got tight, when pushing, shoving

  and trash talk started to creep into the game

  plan. We knew the secret; he only played

  well when angry. They’d make their own monster.

  The more they pushed, the sweeter the song

  of his bounce; the harder they shoved, the surer

  his aim became, his balance impeccable as he let

  his shooting-hand hang limp after each projectile

  took flight. He had something we all didn’t, he knew

  gravity was a kind of violence too; you had to ride it.

  They just reminded him of his father; a short man

  who had shredded his mother with his sharp tongue,

  slapped his son until the day his six-foot-six seed snapped,

  grabbed him by the neck the same way he plucked

  a rebound out of the air. We thought Victor was freak

  material – a unique beast – until we saw his sister play.

  She was good all the time – every quarter of the clock

  face – moved like a whispered insult, precise as a second

  hand, her fury constant as the force that held us down.

  Variables

  (a gambil)

  Asked about heartbreak, X might drop

  a matchstick and raise a finger to point

  at a delivery van rolling heavily past

  a home. Let’s say it’s blue as a flame’s heart

  and it stops in front of a brick building

  where, on the third floor, a boy (Y) is framed

  in his window perch by the yellow lamp

  light beyond him. Y has headphones like planets

  over his ears and is bent over a sheet

  of paper, shading blackness into faces.

  The window next to his is an animation;

  two adult figures gesturing, their mouths black holes.

  Because of the galaxy he carries, the window

  boy – Y – will not hear his parents’ battle, but

  high above the van’s blue, a beat is breaking.

  X has not said a word, weary gaze focussed

  outside. The match X dropped will grow

  into a fire X won’t notice but for its heat,

  won’t recognise – for who wou
ld call a window

  a mirror? Has no one ever told you heartbreak

  is always elsewhere? What is Y in the world of Xs?

  A Gimbal of Blackness

  for Pops

  Night cannot grasp the swift flight

  of wind, but blackens every tree

  the air moves, paints them darker, pushes

  them against the light, the shapeless

  light that gives them shape to shift

  before my eyes. I am often in the embrace

  of night; I am myself a dark thing –

  the kind that was once called boy when man

  – that was born of a woman descended from hills

  and a man delivered from boyhood by the sea,

  a man now lifeless though he gave me life.

  I am often in the embrace of dark thoughts,

  in the dim grasp of memory, a bottle in hand,

  reflecting the light of the moon. I recall

  a can of Guinness left in a London fridge –

  one my father bought but didn’t get to drink,

  kept for me by a well-meaning aunt. And how

  hard my throat shrank with every sip, how sharp

  that smooth black liquid felt inside me, how hard

  these nights that blacken me, broken with grief

  for a man I loved who can no longer grieve.

  Hangman

  Out of the benign madness of our homes, we are

  players of a different ilk, dreamers with no respect

  for height, for flight, for the choke-hold of night.

  Round midnight, and the faded lip of the rim still

  gleams from the desperate reach of a weak street lamp,

  like a vaselined smile beckoning in the corner of a club.

  We shoot our shots and indulge in wordplay, lines

  drafted onto paper each time a letter is called out –

  after the basketball, nerveless despite its perpetual goosebumps,

  kisses the hoop and slides in. Our Hangman is different.

  We have sheaves of thick blank paper and pencils in three grades.

  We’re all artists: when we guess a wrong letter we draw curves

  instead of lines and, because we like to fly, birds are

  our thing. We call our game Wingman. As we play, feathers

  emerge carrying streamlined bodies, the arcs of our three-pointers

  truer with each attempt. We quote Rakim lines as the purest

  form of trash talk, holding both pencil and ball like a grudge

  although we’re drawing the same bird: whether we end up

  with an eagle or a crow, we know there is no noose,

  no pain, just the net and our dreams – nobody dies

  even if one soars.

  Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow

  Wested girl, your city has taught you to hate

  the kind of men you fall for, Pictures of them

  flash on local news cycles every night

  when newsreaders’ lips are twisted by crime

  into shapes never full glass but coloured stem.

  Pale news tongues never mention the melting of Shea

  butter in dark male hands, fingers in grandmothers’ hair,

  the posters of Paddington Bear that they haven’t

  removed from their walls since the age of seven,

  how they hum love songs off-key, the nails they bite

  when nervous. They’ve debated the shots of Sembene

  Ousmane & Kurosawa, read the words of Giovanni & Auden,

  played around with fistfuls of chopped coriander

  to render simple meals great, but the papers

  won’t mention those things: those travel headlines you get

  that label boys as men and men as boys and

  boys as scourges, mark them out as threats

  by sly leans of language. You know that’s truth bent,

  you’ve seen these men’s tears, but come crunch time

  you still see what you’ve been taught, what you desire:

  their bodies – those vessels with shades of darker

  for skin – with muscle, with muscle, with muscle within;

  with muscle, with muscle, with muscle and sin...

  and you forget the epicardium, its sublayers,

  the spaces it cradles within, its pockets of fear.

  Of Serendipity

  Cybernetic serendipity was a phrase invented

  for me by my father – an easy source

  of laughs when a child can’t shape his

  soft Cs or Rs properly, but a priceless gift

  for his vocabulary. Later, he would explain

  gyroscopes as objects with a steady core,

  their orientation maintained with the help

  of outer gimbals that spin. I never asked

  what happens if gimbals break, if

  a heart’s constant tread is unbalanced

  by a break in the body that holds it;

  what happens when serendipity dictates

  that cancer is a hammer that knocks

  gimbals out of shape? What I know

  is: I was out delivering newspapers;

  the weather was icy as death; I felt

  my father depart at the traffic light;

  I raised my handlebars and tried

  to force my way through the red to my own

  demise; horns blared like a final chorus

  but my unbroken gyroscope stayed true.

  Trumpet

  The first time you blow

  a tight-lipped buzz into the funnel

  of a silvered mouthpiece, you understand

  Charles’s Law – the one on held pressure

  not Mingus’s well-thumbed message

  of exact timing – that tells us all we need

  to know about temperature and what volume

  it moves. If it’s hot, it’s straight up

  physics: volume is maximal. You knew,

  but now you really know the fire

  it takes to set that horn alight,

  spark music along its burnished length,

  the molten brass opening out

  to spew

  a resonant shaft

  of burnished, burning air.

  One Night We Hold

  for Ms Bones

  One night we hold and the lights go

  out. Everything in the world turns peripheral

  vision. We lose ourselves in the dark edges

  that pattern the wings of some bright butterfly flitting

  between your skin and mine. We let go of logic,

  history; we believe we are beyond the grasp of gravity

  floating as we are in these sensations we kiss

  with. Time, family and friends swim

  outside the urgency of our hunger. We believe

  in the everlasting of love, never stopping

  to wonder where we might drop anchor. We abandon

  reality’s compass at the border of our lips. All we know

  now is the spin of intoxication, a cocktail of sighs pitched

  into a cauldron of dancing flames. We carry our own light

  birthed, like campfires, from friction;

  two bodies moved by hands to the melting point of Sodium.

  We are salt separating into its elements, we are Lot’s nameless

  wife reclaiming our story. If nobody else looked back

  everything is a rumour. We are sweat without words;

  how it feels is a held breath. Tomorrow’s story sits in

  the depth of our eyes, limpid as lakes reflecting night.

  Eros

  Bottle

  I think of the room, the way

  it separated into definite things

  in new light. the sparse spread

  of furniture; the writing table

  a chequerboard of thought, schemes,

  the bed no longer neat,

  and beside

 
it, shiny glasses, unused, a bottle empty

  of rum, on my tongue the dance of her

  sweat and the sugarcane’s trapped burn

  stripped

  from every limb her body possesses.

  A story –

  some old pub nugget of Ethiopian women

  and their skill at splitting chickens

  into twelve parts, with no need for knives,

  just a tender feel for the limits of flesh,

  the fear it must inspire in stray husbands –

  comes to mind

  when I imagine her body

  that morning: the hunger that tensed my being

  how I was afraid to tell her I might be

  in love with her,

  terrified

  of seeding hopes

  I could not suckle,

  the salt-charged taste of her,

  rum

  that smoulders still

  in the back of my throat.

  break/able

  Last night we left the blinds half/open, so

  the sun would wake us. The train you must catch

  more important than our week/long jive

  with the natural order of things. This is how it comes

  to be that I witness the darkness relaxing its hold

  on our bodies, yielding us to form; first shadowed angles,

  the berried tip of your left breast quick to sip warmth

  from the light. My in/drawn breath is both desire

  and awe; how this break/able body of yours can hold all

  of mine, bucking right back, demanding more, is a miracle

  – as is this slow awakening of my flesh, mimicking sunrise.

  Waking you is my temptation, but the smile that plays

  on your sleeping face is my vanity a/live; I will not kill

  it. Instead I muse on the subtle/ties of love; how, to reach

  ecstasy, I must be weak for you, let you guide me

  as I guide you, no egos fingering the edges of our frailty.

  I remember your eyes holding mine, our laughter manic,

  nothing between us, knowing how well we fit, how all

  our migrations have led to this moment. We spare no energy

  for questions, the kind the world’s eyes throw at us

  the same way the morning/light separates us into sable/sand.

  Contiguity

  Separation is a seven-minute walk

  taken together, one train stop alone,

  followed by another train and an hour’s flight

  – three hours if you count the formalities