And Ever
for Medgar Evers
murdered June 12, 1963, Jackson, Mississippi
You rise
to watch the leaves
breathe light to their edges
and burn,
drawing day from the night
to wake the birds.
You’ve learned this sound,
white chord of a filling lung
that will set the wren to sing,
so you rise
only today
it isn’t leaves—
it’s a moth you’ve never seen,
its wings
not flock, not felt,
but paper—
hundreds, thousands
of photographs
flickering in your breath
then falling,
each into its own light,
another pair of wings.
~
Now the windows switch,
Wallace incandescent
in the schoolhouse door,
Kennedy at his desk.
The children curl
in the broadcast’s glow,
and beyond, silhouettes drift,
blotting fireflies from the night.
It hasn’t rained for weeks,
and everyone is looking
for something to fall.
The airfield strobes planes
from the night.
Leaves pocket
the carhop’s music.
And honeysuckle yawns
till everything smells like breath.
Dust settles
on the sleeping faces,
as headlights sweep,
tires hush the drive.
As the moth on the window
folds to a bullet,
then unfolds
to watch again.
~
~
Then the light
is as fine as dust,
dust a moth strews
as it lights on the screen,
that falls on the face
like honeysuckle’s musk.
Eyes flutter
the dust to angels
and the room
is a heaven,
throngs flocked
from the closet’s sleeves
to the window
and out into the dim
where they hang
their trumpets in the vines.
They call through the crickets’
ever and ever,
then silk themselves
in question marks
beneath the leaves.
~
Or the light
is weak as a candle’s,
swelling, then cooling
as you reach
for those unnamable wings.
Touch,
and they fan over the grass,
the yard’s a writhe of flashlights,
fireflies when there shouldn’t be,
dozens now luminous
in the fractured air.
Drift, shrivel,
they whet,
they hang themselves
in the honeysuckle
then bore deeper
into the leaves.
~
Fold back those wings,
the sleep they’ve gathered
in their eyes,
sleep that has forgotten you.
Fold back those wings
to a vial, a tablet,
lilac his shirt forgot.
The perfect sleeves,
the shirts you ironed
he said he wouldn’t need.
The closet’s furl
of empty arms—
fold back each one
until the shadow gutters
into the shoes,
into dust,
until you find
a breath
of yesterday’s breath.
Somewhere here is an inch of cloth
light has not faded,
color not beaten white
by sun.
You look and then you’re
gripping the sill
in that moment
when everything glows a little,
when the light is everywhere
and there are no shadows,
no matter how
you fold the curtain back.
~
The brother’s face
at the airplane window.
And the dream again.
Willie Tingle,
their father’s friend,
those hands,
broad day,
closing on his skin.
His face
as they bind him to the cart
and drag him
through Decatur’s streets.
The field
where they tie him to a post.
His face
as they lash the shirt away.
As they tie the noose.
As they walk away.
They leave the shirt,
a shadow to outlive.
The hum of the body,
or its absence,
its sprawl.
The name
in the field he walks each day
with Medgar,
the only way to school.
Now he walks alone
through the damp clay of night
to watch moon soak
into the shirt’s easing folds,
to watch moon crust
then flake into wings.
Light like a blind man’s fingers
reading everything.
~
Then morning is dust
engrained in light’s trajectories,
shirts that pollen
when you move.
Everything escapes us—
why we opened closets, doors,
what we said,
faces too bright to see.
Dust would settle
to flock the wings of touch,
lint would rise
if anyone was looking
when the shell is lifted,
the print peeled from the glass,
though to see is to know
everything as aftermath,
not the window
but the bore,
not the oil but the cotton
in the bullet’s grooves,
plaque of light
on everyone’s skin.
~
Soon the day will unfold its cruelties
and someone will have said
and someone will have written
Maybe this will slow them down.
Then everyone can read it,
and the bright faces
will fold like curtains
and leave you at the window
once again.
There,
the moth is spreading.
Lean close enough
and you can see
Medgar, fallen to the drive,
house key in his outstretched hand.
Lean closer,
while the paper’s turning,
while the light is bruising
to a dozen children caged in wire,
their fingers
all you see at first,
and then the dark equator
that halves their eyes,
the jagged latitude of pines
that swallows the last ash
and embers of the day.
Closer, now,
the weave of each child’s shirt
is opening.
The cotton, the paper
swallow all the light.
~
~
And after day has staled
like a glass of water beside the bed,
after morning’s gone,
what does anyone remember?
Nectar. Sweat.
The river’s musk
neither a history
nor a promise of rain.
Honeysuckle’s
the only breathing thing.
Children file with their flags
down the streets
and their flags are taken,
and they are taken,
from the street to the wagon,
from the wagon to the pen,
and the street is left to darken
the way the sky never will.
If anyone is missing
check the fairgrounds first,
check the cages they made
to hold them all.
Check the bushes and the vacant lots.
Someone ran away.
Something rustled in the vines
where they found the rifle
and a fingerprint so sweetgum-sharp
someone will know its tree.
Someone saw an empty car
in the drive-in lot,
the kind of white
that talks through the night to the moon.
The moon was failing and someone
turned as the t.v. cooled
to see the president’s ghost
in the dimming tube.
A cab trawled the neighborhood,
a telegram or a passenger to unfold.
A man at the depot
read a phone book to the air,
and somewhere in the night
a radio played the speech again
and someone laughed
at one hundred years of delay
and someone stayed late
for the picture show.
and at the end when the ship was burning
and the theater filled with smoke
a moth rose into the light
and came apart in the air.
~
~
Whatever falls
falls quietly
into the wool of breath,
into the handkerchief
or the sleeve.
An eyelash.
A tear.
Drops of sweat
to suggest the withheld rain.
And whatever falls
falls through the temple’s boiling air,
switch of paper fans
and photographs
and the strobes
that hold your face a moment,
first one cheek,
then the other. . .
And whatever falls
falls quietly
into the eulogy
he hadn’t wanted
because those who give them
never mean them,
into the newsreels’ whispers,
into the scent of gladiolas
and the stink of film
which is the smell of memory
as it leaves you,
given like a pollen.
Its flowers
write themselves
into your fingers
and become a part of everything
you touch.
The arms that hold you
when you leave the temple,
the hands,
the crowded air.
~
What follows is the sound
of song choked back,
forbidden hymn
that needs to break
like glass on the asphalt
and give back the day.
What follows is the hush of cloth,
the silent march
down Lynch Street
and across the tracks
where policemen thicken
on the white side of town,
then Farish
where every window
is a book of eyes,
faces, noise.
Crew-cut teens and jukebox blare
in a drugstore’s door
till someone pulls the plug
so the wish of pants legs and skirts
can fill the street again.
~
Later the song will break,
one voice, then another,
this little light of mine,
then dozens, hundreds running
all over Capitol Street,
I’m gonna let it shine
on the riot squad’s
bright helmets.
And later, the man in the paper
with a bandaged skull
and a shirt torn to gauze,
a room of song behind him,
will be pulled from a building
and beaten again
and thrown in the fairgrounds’ cages
with trucks of other mourners.
But for now his is just one of the faces
waiting as the coffin’s drawn
into the funeral home,
where the wood is polished,
where the flag is tucked
for the ride to Washington,
just one of the faces
the bearers can see
through the curtains,
the shirt
just one of thousands
now blistering in the sun.
~
~
They’re waiting in their Sunday bests
when the hearse arrives,
knowing somehow
he would be coming,
crowding the platform
when the caisson rolls into the frame
with the flag-draped coffin,
turned away
toward the schedule
that tells how long they have.
When the train is boarded,
they crowd the window
where the women sit
with the flag
and as the station pulls away,
as town gives way
to field, even in the thickets
they’re there, their shirts,
their hats and dresses
flowering the blur,
and in Tuscaloosa
and Birmingham and Anniston
turning the stations into churches,
knowing somehow he would be coming.
Whenever they wake,
they are there—
impossible to see them all,
waiting like water
in the trampled fields,
like shards of moon
in the evening’s failures,
glass that gathers
the fugitive light.
And even now
as dust lays its unclosable wings
on the faces of the sleeping,
as it settles into the breath
and the tangles of vine,
the window’s bore,
the kitchen’s pale seizures of light,
even now,
as she looks again,
glowing soft as honeysuckle’s lamps,
as moths against the glass.
