Standing in the Atlantic

We were after death and before. Rising
Out of the drowned kingdom,
Some walked in the direction of Mali
Toward the blue chant coming from the cow
Skin and string stretched over the calabash’s mouth,
A kora carrying Timbuktu’s salt market—
Its holler and gold—over the executioners,
The sharks’ desolate dorsal fins cutting
The horizon, the ocean into before
And after I could no longer touch
My mother’s name, the night her fingers
Make when they touch my eyelids
Which is the origin of night—
A woman’s hand to your face, a fire after,
Walking beneath it until a bird lifts dawn
Over an orchid’s screaming white head and the stone-
Colored cat crouching in the grass waiting
To pounce on dawn’s light emissary
Drowning, drowning in dawn.
Some of the drowned walked through
The emptying waves toward the indigo
Bushes burning on an unknown shore,
Their names called on brick plantations,
In rows of cotton, the thorn of which
Mixed them down to blood and land
And someone calling out to them for rest,
A night, a forest, a snake to ride
Out of the marsh buckling down into heat,
Leech, and the crooked day laboring
Their laboring bodies, its fingers jammed
Into their mouths, prying their lips apart
As if to see into that little bit of privacy,
The darkness, covering their runagate
Runagate hearts. The memory of wood,
Tunisia burned; this call put into the dead
For rest, a forest, a snake to ride.
Do you not hear our names being called,
Said a man who carried the splinters
Of wood from the ship’s belly beneath his nails.
Do you not hear your name?