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Kanairo

/ In this place of colliding times, / No word for it in childhood,

and unrecognizable in this dusk, / Nairobi comes and goes. /

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(after Part II: Gray Latitudes , after Michelle K. Angwenyi )

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we kowtow to the complicated mouth of memory,

genuflect before its jeweled spine,

kneel before its brass, to its salt hinges,

how it opens only to call our names

in a city that blushes at the sight of lovers –

that knows the etiquette of lovers,

wears the tryst like silk,

knows the warm musculature

& the leonine grace of Sandra McPherson's poetry.

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You in the muddy puddle/ are a splash of silver,

a comet,

so you sit, become the directory of a dancing moonlight.

We touch your scars – how they burn!

Yes! I press my ear to your scars,

hear the sea rise.

We will tickle them (oh, they’re bold! oh, they’re bright!)

will kneel interrogating them for their gospels.

Only a place starving for sublimation,

a place priapic for transcendence,

would make a symposium of a shadowed body,

make red skin confess itself redder.

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Balaclava

In Warrap, & a friend’s hands knocking

the drum open,

saying, “Come! Come! Come!

In times of grief,

we sing until the walls forgive us.

We’ll dance to the beat of my big wooden drum!”

as if grief could have a hollow

you could pour light into.

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My own light —

I walk into my childhood home/

I walk back into a house with my childhood still rotting in it.

It smells of death.

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My lineage bows under the debauchery

of men who toast their own undoing;

buckles beneath the weight of men

who pickle their hearts.

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How to endure in such harbors of echo?

Tell me — how to survive a place

that still remembers the sound of you leaving?

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In the city, we draw our caps over our brows.

In the city, a bird mistakes my shadow for its home.

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2008

& In Naivasha, the air is bruise,

a man runs into the street

holding the door to his own house.

The house is burning.

His neighbors are burning.

The wind burns.

God, I am trying to imagine your hair,

& if I am the tick in it, am I also the itch?

There are nights when the smoke, in Naivasha,

make the lake take on the color of ash

& taste like the inside of your palm

after clutching a match too long.

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Nineteen bodies, mother, & still

the sky wants to be beautiful —

folding into itself like a bedsheet

you swore would be the last.

& still, the children in the yard practice the word

that the radio sang

Jam-bo Jam-bo bwa-na Ha-ba-ri ga-ni?

Mzu-ri sa-na

– as if there weren’t men outside

making a bonfire of my country’s genealogy.

I have seen this before: the slow undoing

of a people,

a hymn turning brittle in the mouth;

Jam-bo Jam-bo bwa-na Ha-ba-ri ga-ni?

Mzu-ri sa-na.

I name each ghost in the cadence of waves,

letting the tide carry their syllables

out to a sea that remembers everything.