Four
(from the collection: Healing Earthquakes)
As if, when I was born, the doctore gave the blanket
I was swaddled in to a police hound to sniff,
and while judicial clerks tabulated future statistics
for how many policemen would have to be hired,
I slept in a dream of lavender folds
in my crib,
my flesh over my bones
like those long floor-to-ceiling curtains
in palaces,
I dreamed another world beyond me,
of horses and women and food,
of fields and dancing and songs,
unknowing that when I was carried from the hospital
in my blanket,
a police dog snarled at my passing,
a new set of handcuffs was being made,
and in the distance a new prison was being built.
At an early age
A heavy Bible was placed in my hand,
You got to get down and work hard, they told me.
You can't be talking back.
Whatever you do, watch out not to get in trouble,
'cause they'll be looking for you,
expecting you to get in trouble, they said.
Trouble was the furthest thing from my mind
when I knelt in a church
or climbed the rickety choir loft stairs to sing,
o love was me, o happy was I, young child
hyptnotized by the stained-glass
window
eye of God
circled above the alter back wall
dawn effused and made glow with
blue robes
angels and doves
as I sang Latin hymns,
opening my mouth as wide and wholesome
as a frog
on a pond in the full-moon
summer night,
while shadows of pigeons on the edge of the stained-
glass window---
Lord, I didn't see no blood of mine spilling on the dirt,
Lord, that others thought I was bad
had
predestined my fate
to fall early,
struck later in life
from
the blind side
by one clean sweeping stroke of law
I couldn't foresee
because I was too blinded by the blaze of beauty around me,
too in love with an old man's walk and cane
to even think he might curse a mean fate on me,
too in love with vigorous icy air of dark dawn
to think others might be plotting my future
at the hands of jailers.
But violence followed me.
On a cold November dusk, boys' brown arms cold and numb,
noses sniffling, dust in our hair, smudged cheeks,
while bats flitted like black gloves
from the leafless trees, and on the distant freeway semis
gutted the air with growls,
while all the boys on the playground were blending
into the shades
of evening,
I turned from the sandbox,
my nose running mucus, my fingers dark crickets
in the sand, I turned and saw
a
big Indian boy by the fence,
from his hand a thick coil of chain slurped
onto the ground, whiplike,
and across from him a blond boy
with blue eyes, in a torn T-shirt
in midwinter, both approached
warily as tigers on my brother,
backing
him off into the fence,
and then by an elm tree I saw a huge brown stone
on the ground,
and I dashed for the rock, picked it up, ran at the white boy
who had hit my brother and lunged at him with the rock,
hitting him on the head,
falling back on the ground with him,
at five years old, war-blood on my hands,
my heart screaming
as if it had been bitten and ripped
to shreds by bats
and since then
violence had always followed me---
in trees, down sidewalks, crouched in bushes, behind houses,
it leaps on me as I stand to confront
other bullies beating a thousand other brothers and sisters.
