SHORTLISTED
GEORGIO RUSSELL
Through Babylon
Gold has become the color of distance,
and of your sorrow.
Jay Wright, Journey to the Place of Ghosts
We were the last to leave the green minibus
and join the mob and babel of that plaza
where the down and uptown folks force a marriage
between terminals, pedestrians and their patois rife
as the flies that tried to find a light
along my face. The smut scent of wet earth
extended a vow of flowers across the new parish
as well, almost unanimous, petrichor
smuggled in with the passenger chatter
at the source of our travel, Ocho Rios
and its coda notes of rain. I held my blue
umbrella parallel to my leg
like rifles at the patrolling soldiers’ sides.
We started at the foot of the clocktower
near the notorious taxi pilots, parked
and barking fares in a wild rivalry.
Along that walk toward the bank
and other errands, I heard and saw
the city dissected, the rawness
below what a good brochure
might show. The idle lions of reggae
glued the lesser sounds together:
the krik and krak of a trolley’s
old joints, the indecisive hiss
of plastic, olés sung loud
by rummy men, blessing Barcelona.
Farther down, a quarrel lifted like a blunt
cutlass, high as a higgler’s outcry
for Christ. A patty’s paper casket rode
a minor hemorrhage of water
toward a storm drain, clotted with losses
borne that day and days before.
I heard and dropped a proverb boasting
hope for the world, the speaker seen
from the street, a woman from a higher time.
Her mouth mashed in a dark pout,
the lantern unlit on the sill beside her
a faded incantation, she played
the veiny matador, raising the red
drench of her nightie beyond
the rusty grille that barred her
window, flashing the tears in that fabric
to bait the high bull of the sun.
Nobody I saw had paused to study
the entropy, no awe for the ordinary
hour, the murderous urban order,
whose final prophet was a doorway
to several abandoned storeys, whose
breath was the urine sighed
onto the streets. The smell of exile
gilded the spices, people, and posthumous
promise of rain, and there, before
that hovel, my lover, who once lived
in that place she labeled Babylon
remembered the gold rings
I had never removed all semester.
She rushed to peel each band
and stow them in her handbag, rescue
my fingers from the secret
scythes inside the crowd, alarm
and lecture in her dialect, the hasty
summary of blood spilled before
by muggers who would trade those karats
to quench what angers moved inside.
Satan had come anew to stage his comedies
in Kingston, ever-present
behind the scenery, the penury,
like the mountain there with its overcast
crown folding your vision
in all directions, spectral and archaic.
For the rest of that walk, the fear
my love had given me
made me hide my hands from them
in the lock of my pockets,
as any migrant or Midas might have,
as if anything I touched
would become coated with the glories
they were seeking, and they,
believing then that I could provide
such light, such deliverance,
would sever my hand
and use it to clutch forever
the squalid organ of their city.
Blue Season
I
With black sight, with skin black as faith,
we walked along the dark hallway
in the wake of our father’s flooded steps
while outside the tiled house, whose
eyes we lidded with plywood
in the dry light, the first of three storms
our region would see that season
made an awaited invasion. A stubborn
percussion knuckled through the rooftop
we feared the winds would scalp, exposing
the roachy nature of our quick survival
scurry. Two days’ deluge — the lamp
in the larger bedroom had fallen barren,
batteries defunct in each flashlight, a ceiling
leak above the bed exiling five bodies
into passage. My father in front of the wade
line, inching the canal toward a new
illuminated nation: the den, that evening,
was a Canaan of candlelights, the far scent
of its cinnamon a beacon half-parting
the opacity — he voiced a few alarms
down the one-lane corridor, a warning
of things amorphous in the water
we maneuvered, reaching behind and forward
for each other, the way the lost
will grope their own breath for god.
Our mother, at the tailend, told us to wing six arms
against the walls, to prop our progress better
in the blindness — soon we saw
that jarred light jig upon a surface, behind
a handsewn curtain stapled jamb to jamb
as mice that entered with the rain ran
in weaves between our feet. It was a dark
grown noisy with the knowledge
that a weaker hurricane had caved
a neighbor’s livelihood in, lifted the dead
from their rest, the seas eager to offer
service and scatter the spirit — a dark
having come to full consensus
at the crafting of our safety, those boards
we helped our father fix, armor against the sago
palms seeded after yesteryear’s weather.
They begged sanctuary, banging
the wood while the farther trees surrendered
loud amputations to the conquering.
II
Jaundice of noon, and the yard was strewn
with the storm chaff and the roads
rashy with debris and other children
walking the tightrope of grounded,
crisscross conifers. Phone poles lay
toppled next to potholes
and puddles, and the panorama was dim
as the island’s outage, a secular Lent
we disobeyed, eating canned food and fruits
basketed after the menopause of their uprooted
kingdoms. Mother took the twins to town
to buy wellbeing, and they had gone
like Noah’s dove as well to camera
the damage. I swept the prelude of our drowning
over the doorsill, beneath coo-crazy pigeons
hidden in the eaves,
once in a while pausing my broom to prove
how tragedy tugs one’s gaze, the confetti
of that annual carnival caught
in every eyeball, like endless melanin flecks
inside a bloodshot archipelago —
and this was no moment to lament
what loss was undiscovered, the news
of known names under muscles of rubble —
the second crusade would come
from the East in quick weeks, and so my father
was a stoic below a steely fog
of clouds, securing the shingles
for when the next weeping drummed our sleep.
A far calypso scored the repair, those sticky sagos
near the windows still sturdy as the beams
my father showed me when this home
was still in the bone phase. Later, mother
returned with patois report, and her passion
honored the native hurt and the flat lands’
learned scowls — again the shallow graves robbed,
a small morgue’s worth of poverty
leveled inland, smorgasbord for seabirds
while the shanties standing on stilts fell
cripple, hauled away by water — but this
was already history, this ritual lashing,
the route those blasé masters traveled to breed
agony rutted in our bones, cradle of blood.
III
Surrounded by new lanterns, the ceiling
seemingly healed in spite of long stains
in the stucco, we were a cluster
aligned on a queen size, strung together
with our sweat, held in the howl and bully
of one recurring curse — my kin
was any who heard those hammers slam,
who waited in partial darkness
for morning to mention which parish
or what body the night had swallowed
into ghosthood — we lay ourselves
so clueless of tomorrow, the day we’d we lose
this home to the yearly threat
of empire, lead our fearful shadows
into shelters, the odor of moldy clothing
a proper omen: that foreign pox would ruin us
soon, begin the long bane of plundered light.
The lost will often conjure god,
and that particular time my father decided
to hold the faux gold of his saxophone.
Then our mother sprang her soprano praise
while we, three kids who stink of kerosene,
choired and clapped a coup d’état, the storm
belittled by the sun of our salvation
songs — hours we mustered the sound
of simple worship, our blues easing
the blue season, and all this fat faith intact
until, from heaven, more water poured
to pause performance, recall to us
how close we were to corpses
in the hissing rain. Instead of heading to the den
again, misfortune made our torsos
tambourines of laughter, and we let
the new leaks brim as if, in a minute,
the roof would peel a full cesarean, finally,
and hands would lower soon
to lift us from unnatural blackness.
Bone-Bingo
That year a violence made the ocean
surge and spoon the humans out the shallow
ground of a churchyard, the hurricane in question
spreading our dead among the miscellany,
banana leaves and zinc, a broken galore left
on the roads like crepe paper after parade.
I saw those ditches pictured in the island
diction. In this re-telling, I become a griot
myself, speaking on soily voids, the frazzled
grass, acres unfurling like the shrouds
that kept each body unbitten by bug
or crow, the stony chiseled epitaphs
shuffled about, such that those who died
before us were misquoted quite often.
Front page, locals were collecting the bones,
the first gleaners who had found
their own spines folded, forensic in the post
-mortem of a storm, bending to compose the past
again. After the gazettes, all news gave over
to the grapevine, and we grew up hearing
how the elders’ eyes had turned to give them
x-ray vision, having spied a pelvis in the gumbo
limbo tree, a foot the floods had cut
and conveyed to settle in a stray’s stash,
the plosive weight of a ribcage
found in the bramble, hut for the coquís
keening names in severed notes.
They sang those iambs to guide
the night parties looking, with propane,
for remains to place in the old sanctuary,
where none have prayed in a century
and boxes square as books line the dusty
linen carpet, holding the bones
that lay for years in patient generations.
So absurd, that searching, my people
made a game to cope with it,
calling victory at the skull chunk
in the lagoon, bingo to the hawksbill
crawling the bank with a partial
patella, some aboriginal jutting
from its beak, the femurs they looked for
in palmettos by the tourist cabana,
a coccyx blending with the conch
and quahog’s hearses in the sand.
They buried that vigilance in the genes
of their children, my father who said
bingo because he saw your cigarette
as one of few phalanges, a naked pinkie
dangling coolly out the corner
of your mouth, and me who calls
those pillars before the Government
House a line of giant tibia.
Fossils from the former current emerge
even now, this shibboleth long
as language, though we rarely discover
a full frame, intact as a word
that keeps both body and meaning
despite the calendar’s code-switch.
I used to wonder why, after so long,
the bones kept being found
and felt a fallacy trouble me, as if some juju
on the land had made these fractures
appear every year, so long
as we were looking, evidence of old
violence sprung from our quest
to piecemeal memory
back together, no end in sight
to such recovery. But just last June,
on my walk to junior Jonkonu,
toward the cowbells clanging a merry
mood, I found by the cove
where a child’s perfect decay
once came to light
another crèche of kids
swimming laughter
and for time enough forgot
that urge to analyze history, the old gyre
long gone and frog-song sweeter here
where faith and festivals abide beside our bones.
