Lighthead Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  [THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA]

  ALL THE WAY LIVE

  THE GOLDEN SHOVEL

  SHAKUR

  THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA

  NEW FOLK

  A PLATE OF BONES

  THE SHEPHERD

  HIDE

  FOR BROTHERS OF THE DRAGON

  THREE MEASURES OF TIME

  [GOD IS AN AMERICAN]

  THE AVOCADO

  A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME

  CARP POEM

  THE ELEGANT TONGUE

  MYSTIC BOUNCE

  ANCHOR HEAD

  A FORM OF SEXUAL HEALING

  TWENTY MEASURES OF CHITCHAT

  NOTHING

  GOD IS AN AMERICAN

  [COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE]

  LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO ADDICTION

  LINER NOTES FOR AN IMAGINARY PLAYLIST

  SATCHMO RETURNS TO NEW ORLEANS

  FISH HEAD FOR KATRINA

  SNOW FOR WALLACE STEVENS

  TANKHEAD

  TWENTY-SIX IMAGINARY T-SHIRTS

  MUSIC TO INTERROGATE BY

  THE MUSTACHE

  COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE

  [COCKTAILS WITH ORPHEUS]

  BULLETHEAD FOR EARTHELL

  SUPPORT THE TROOPS!

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS?

  IMAGINARY WEDDING SONG

  LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO PARENTING

  GHAZAL-HEAD

  I AM A BIRD NOW

  COCKTAILS WITH ORPHEUS

  ARBOR FOR BUTCH

  MULE HOUR

  AIRHEAD

  Notes

  About the Author

  PENGUIN POETS

  ALSO BY TERRANCE HAYES

  Wind in a Box

  Hip Logic

  Muscular Music

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2010

  Copyright © Terrance Hayes, 2010 All rights reserved

  Page xi constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Hayes, Terrance.

  Lighthead / Terrance Hayes.

  p. cm.—(Penguin poets)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-22288-1

  I. Title.

  PS3558.A8378L54 2010

  811’.54—dc22 2009053319

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For our lit and light blue Love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincere thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications for first acknowledging the poems (and previous versions of the poems) in this manuscript:

  American Poetry Review, Bat City Review, Barrelhouse magazine, Black Warrior Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, McSweeney’s Literary Journal, McSweeney’s Online, MiPOesias, Muckworks, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Quarterly West, Sou’wester, Smartish Pace, The New Yorker, Third Coast, and Washington Review.

  “The Avocado” also appeared in State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems, edited by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder.

  “Cocktails with Orpheus” and “Mystic Bounce” also appeared in Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Norman Minnick.

  “The Elegant Tongue” appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, edited by Cate Marvin and Michael Dumanis.

  “Fish Head for Katrina” also appeared in So Much Things to Say! 100 Calabash Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes.

  “A House Is Not a Home” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner and David Lehman.

  Deepest gratitude to Yona Harvey, Rob Casper, Shara McCallum, Jeffery Thomson, and Crystal Williams for laying their careful eyes on this collection; and to the Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support. Thanks, as well, to those who influenced this manuscript through friendship, encouragement, and conversation: Elizabeth Alexander, Radiclani Clytus, Toi Derricotte, Adrian Matejka, Paul Slovak, and my families.

  It is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”

  LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

  Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,

  I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.

  This hour, for example, would be like all the others

  were it not for the rain falling through the roof.

  I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless

  with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra

  in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.

  Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight

  drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life

  doing no more than preparing for life and thinking,

  “Is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come

  to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,

  something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables

  of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words

  and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

  The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say

  about the way we live. I’d rather have what my daddy calls

  “skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street

  just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:

  that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement

  of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.

  I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.

  I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us

  Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,

  sometimes I taste her caution. But let’s not talk about that.

  Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.

  Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires

  upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction

  of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word<
br />
  like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.

  All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet

  the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper

  you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom

  of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities

  the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.

  Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights

  out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.

  [THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA]

  ALL THE WAY LIVE

  “Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?”

  Hieronymus asked, hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered

  Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets

  The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of Robert

  E. Lee guarding the county courthouse, a symbol of the bondage

  We had spent all of our All-the-Way Lives trying to subvert.

  Hieronymus’s thighs shimmered like the wings of a teenage

  Cockroach beneath his skirt as a bullhorn of sheriff verbs

  Like Stop! Freeze! and Fire! outlined us. The town was outraged:

  The red-blooded farm boys, the red-eyed bookworms of Harvard,

  The housewives and secretaries, even a few liberals hoorayed

  When they put us on trial. We were still wearing our lady wardRobes,

  Hieronymus and me, with our rope burns bandaged

  And our wigs tilted at the angle of trouble. Everyone was at war

  With what it meant to be alive. That’s why we refused to be banished,

  And why when they set us on fire, there was light at our core.

  THE GOLDEN SHOVEL

  after Gwendolyn Brooks

  I. 1981

  When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

  cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

  men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

  His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

  drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left

  in them but approachlessness. This is a school

  I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we

  are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

  of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.

  Standing in the middle of the street last night we

  watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike

  his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight.

  Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we

  used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing,

  his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.

  The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

  watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.

  He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

  He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We

  stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

  how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June

  the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

  got down on our knees in my room. If I should die

  before I wake, Da said to me, it will be too soon.

  II. 1991

  Into the tented city we go,

  we-akened by the fire’s ethereal

  afterglow. Born lost and cooler

  than heartache. What we

  know is what we know. The left

  hand severed and school-

  ed by cleverness. A plate of

  weekdays cooking. The hour lurk-

  ing in the afterglow. A late-

  night chant. Into the city we

  go. Close your eyes and strike

  a blow. Light can be straight-

  ened by its shadow. What we

  break is what we hold. A sing-

  ular blue note. An outcry

  singed exiting the throat. We

  push until we thin,

  thinking we won’t creep back again.

  While God licks his kin, we

  sing until our blood is jazz,

  we swing from June to June.

  We sweat to keep from we-

  eping. Groomed on a diet

  of hunger, we end too soon.

  SHAKUR

  I’m coming at you live from the halfway out

  Where the winter morning stretches out

  Like a white sheet over lovers the infinite

  Has fetched. The still and bone-blue white

  Couple found parked, frozen on the highway,

  I’m thinking of them and the drug that made

  Them think they were warm enough to chill

  Because I know staying alive requires pills

  And a wicked streak. I’d need a head cocooned

  In bass, I’d need to be locked in a womb

  To hear your dopey two-note melody, your song

  Pimped by wreckage, your light longing

  For lightness. I’d have to be as quiet

  As the youths whose youth made them stupid

  And lovely. They are God’s niggaz now like you.

  I’m thinking of the stall of intoxicated cool

  That stalled you before it stalled them. I know

  Men who want to die this way, smoke like snow

  Tattooing their bodies with narcotic holiness,

  The glaze of status, the faux lacquer of bliss.

  I’m coming at you live frostbitten and thinking,

  “Language is for losers.” Who cannot think

  Our elegies are endless endlessly and the words

  We put to them too often unheard and hurried?

  I’m coming at you live from the intangible.

  Do you want to ride, or die crowded into a small

  Space spitting, Come with me? One day my song

  Will be called “Language Is for Lovers.” One

  Day desire will not be a form of wickedness.

  And when you offer your drug, O Ghost, I’ll resist.

  THE LAST TRAIN TO AFRICA

  after Elizabeth Alexander

  doesn’t leave the train station, according to the story

  Stagger tells, until tomorrow morning. We shoot up 23

  North, singing our version of Tribe, put pedal to floor

  doing a buck fifty, Stagger’s braids in a red bandanna,

  chrome on the rims, the cab smoky, the volume rolled

  to its end. Beyond the insomniac nuclear silos built against

  nature where the wind tastes like roadkill or tiny bowls

  of fire, a gun in the glove box, there is no one badder

  than Stagger speeding across two counties until I can see

  he’s getting staggerly. I drive the rest of the way, pedal to floor,

  because his train to Africa is leaving before she can please

  him. We stop at a drive-through strip club where the poor and

  lonely are working. Naked, jaded, sea-hag-looking sisters,

  only one of them pretty, a dark chocolate chattering girl.

  Stagger spends the next hour soaking his money in her

  skin. Between there and Africa Simpson, all his questions

  amount to, “What’s someone like you doing here with the aunts

  of poverty?” To which each of her answers sounds like “Rent.”

  I had no money, but the whole time I napped she was haunting

  my body. I was so fucked up then, even the reflections

  of truckers were godlike to me. She was one of my nieces,

  caught along a road named America or named Jemima,

  bucking for bills or company with the rhythm of a rhesus

  monkey. We made the train, but her image was still with me.

  NEW FOLK

  I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.

  After “We acoustic banjo disciples!” Jebediah said, “
When

  and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers

  come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotten intended?”

  We stole my Uncle Windchime’s minivan, penned a simple

  ballad about the drag of lovelessness, and drove the end

  of the Chitlin’ Circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple

  where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened

  by our twelve-bar conviction. A month later, in pulled

  a parade of well-meaning alabaster post-adolescents.

  We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled

  in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends

  first because beneath our twangor slept what I’ll call

  a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when