After Richmond Barthé’s sculpture, Head of a Negro
I.
Then you read the title, which is Head of a Negro.
Child, you think, a boy, you see. His cheekbones,
high diagonals, soft with fat, padded, and the eyes
spaced apart, the remnants of a young, endearing
open-eyed look onto the world. Like a child’s,
the contour rounded jaw, light cleft in the chin
with the foreshadowing of adulthood there.
The forehead will lose its smooth plain. The jaw
line will cut a defined edge you recognize
in the profile of your own son’s face, pre-
adolescent, his brown skin bronze like
the bronze cast over terracotta. The sculptor left
the eyes hollowed, unfilled, yet they glance
downwards. It’s the look of a boy caught
in his own thoughts, how your son looks
reckoning with his own dialectics. When you look
at the careful left-sided part sculpted in the hair,
and the curls’ lap of brushed waves—you know
someone cares for the child, has taught him to care
well for himself, the hair brushed so—
II.
You can imagine—your father says,
afternoon sunlight, hitting the mute button,
in his living room arm chair, the tv news hour on,
the day’s overview, which he watches faithfully,
and recounts how lives are broken, breaking,
videoed, broadcast, by which he means,
the young Black people, who he’s angered to see
captured this way and exposed, and often
dead, in mind if not body, in brutal circumstances
for all to view,—he says, who gets to turn away?
Who’s watching themselves dying? Again, and again,
he warns those closest to him;
he who is more often sunk by what it takes to live
in this country, to drive down the street, enter a store,
and so now chooses to retreat to what he sees
through the sliding glass doors:
his bright impatiens in their beds, apple trees,
to which he earlier rose on his cane and leaned
until among their snow blossoms alongside the bees,
surrounded in floral-sweet fragrance,
from where your father says, And, no one wants you to be
bitter. He says that the eyes of this world are closed
to so many of us. He says to you—when you are
six months into your pregnancy with your not-yet-
born son—anywhere else, across the world, your child
may grow up, safer, intact, he says, than here at home.
Our Days Were Ordinary
| my daughter on the walk to school my daughter along her preferred route my daughter with the morning glories how do they behave their velvet midnight-blue faces morning open to the sun faces dropped at dusk my daughter a fine bright summer morning my daughter inquires as to when and how and if my daughter guzzles the honeysuckles my daughter strips papery skin from a eucalyptus my daughter reveals the trunk’s cream-beneath my daughter proposes to peel her bark my daughter asks about ability after all and although my daughter clutches my arm my daughter queries darker than her preference to grow up to become my daughter hunches to the bee nudged in the red hibiscus my daughter buzzes at the bee my daughter says sorry mommy my daughter says can you shed |