Harbour
Sometimes I take off my glasses
to hear you better. Missing your contours
soothes me. In the daytime, the on again,
off again flicker of sleeping machines
is more chin check than spook to me.
But deglazed letters slip me up. Loom blurs
into luminous, inner ear defies
the dictionary’s dictates. It feels good
to unrig rigor, to fumble in the fog
instead of staring things down. I drift off,
no look just listen. No sweaty seats
or ringed armholes. Do this/do that is off
the table. It’s not that kind of algorithm.
I suppose I do talk to myself now. I say a
salve for the drying cartilage. Or I burrow.
All I can tell you is we will not always be
spoken to this way-- and hope it’s true.
Nothing loathes a self like an imposter.
Call it intuition, the hypocrite’s fear. It
came on strong on the ride home
from the hospital. The car-seat fit,
I knew that. We even checked it at a fire-station.
They said we couldn’t leave unless we did.
Even as motion slows, my gut churns when I tell
a student I am the guardrail, and clog my gnostic
impulses. Now that I know, I know this is not
in loco parentis. I stop short of saying run free.
Is this the cure, stopping up each mind I counsel?
Am I the doctor institutionalizing my very own?
I can’t read without my spectacles.
You know that. It’s not for me to tell it slant.
Emily and I would never have met, were she here,
or I there. But an hour is a sea,
before each you and me.
With you, the blur draws close,
with you I can trust myself.
Magnificat.
tongue slips mother
loose from virgin,
mary split from mater.
, divine curse: we
daughter first, then
mother them. self,
espoused, sluices
out of bounds. twice
burnt, bush snuff
is elsewhere’s
gone. found
wanting, fondness
flounders, heaving: o
to have been perfected
would have been enough.
such nothing’s plenty
be just enough
. breached womb,
that old house
saving self
for selfhood;
self-same vow:
charisma’s profit on’t,
self, centered. whose
skin worn thin, turnt
inside out? flare’s
muchness:
everything
coming up
is roses.
voice mail.
apple is unable to transcribe
my baba’s naturalized speech.
out of Africa’
s lion’s den
he strides, to
brave each stare.
npr says 40% of america
cannot read. others don’t
really know what the
fourth
means, what spell it casts.
which flags forged,
what oath sworn.
this elderly black male
keeps driving.
an elderly white female, amai,
steers him. a wrong turn
or sudden brake would
launder them,
as in, shit,
they’d lose the little they
care to count/on. folks,
obama has left the building.
*
she pushes play.
this hushed plea
: daughter, i, eh,
have not been able
to get a gift for your
mother. /i cannot leave/without her.
he does not say she clings.
he does not say she grasps. or falters.
/daughter listens:
amai’s birthday
was last friday. they all ate
home-made cake with candles:
7 and 9. the frosting was store-bought.
baba says softly
all he has to say.
he is too quiet
to be heard sometimes,
sometimes too angry.
his muted
mood is never blue. never
indigo, just
quiet. who fears death, he says,
trapped here?
his mother already lays
in peace beneath the soil her
untutored hands first ploughed,
her loss his total eclipse.
his daughter is a doctor
who cannot heal anyone.
she speaks like an idiot child.
what must be understood
is not said with delusion’s reach nor
as stubborn resort to her mother
tongue. throat caught on
english,
this whispered anguish. he
cannot /get out/of the house
without amai.
say: the clutch
will not release.
(he should not be driving
alone. or at all).
they bought
her a card at walgreens,
on the way home
from the doctors.
a father-daughter outing.
sly guide, she
walked him to a rack for
wives. she suggested he hide a visa
card inside, a landmine of decisions.
her mistake. still,
they chose the
cards together. (her wrist flicking
underhand, culling hallmarks of
excess -- trite and ugly and $7.99).
in the end, the visa
card-- the gift to come--
mystifies him more
than amai’s american tears did,
years ago, that one birthday
he forgot or slighted.
even now his mind
drifts like a cloud of
undying grey
fuzz
the daughter’s son –
his most
hoarded joy – her
son
nuzzles, pulls.
is this joy, one year
in? she lets her mind wander
into her: our son still cannot sleep. her son’s father
is mukwasha to
her baba yet “mukwasha”
feels foreign to
his cackalaky mouth so he brandishes
no power in that name.
his spirit
does not sing.
missing is
the limb that would turn
limp into lope.
his cherished
phantom.
mother.
he, her ultimate joy, her
first love’s final envoy,
their youngest. history
has made more of them,
by giving less. his
father dreams each black
son of america his equal,
and names this third one so.
the name of the father,
tenderly, clasps on last
son to him, his junior.
baba strains her patience, one day’s diagnosis
catatonia, the next he’s all song and dance:
didn’t my lord deliver
dan-yell (all three times);
thanking
the nurse on
his actual knees,
clapping as
if he were home
; hiiiyii, you have
delivered me
today!
he is always sincere, she grants.
the back of her mind
taxes her – her son
half fed, his father
left manning
a solitary post while
she (daughter,
duped again) charts the way
out, again.
the old man makes
her crazy. his mind is full of
old suspicions, old fears,
old witness, old resentment,
old expectation, old poverty,
old shame, old pride.
honestly,
*
baba’s stories are like
ambuya grinding groundnuts
on the grinding stone that ground
the peanut butter. spread
on the bread, sold on the roadside,
it paid the bus fare back to
reading, writing: her mission.
a grinding machine grinds maize.
you pay to use it, to turn beads
of “corn” into mealie meal. which is finer
than anything america has on offer.
anyways
these stories are taking up time.
seated in the grey living room,
at daughter’s house, or around
a dining table of real oak shipped
from africa, above, a fake chandelier’s
bevvy of actual prisms. it’s all obscene
in this light:
tete has gotten through for once:
these days
electricity comes between midnight
and 2, just enough time to charge
a phone. baba tries home more
often. each time, the same thing.
eh, daughter, the call card is
not working, each time it says “the person
you are trying to reach
is not available. please
try again later.” but my pin
number should be correct.
please, ask the whatsapp what
is her correct phone number.
/to explain is too much. his stricken
stealth halts daughter’s rush. what
is not working is this
coup without a coup to uninstall
30 years’ disintegrated infrastructure. *
so: listen to what he has left.
hear his free fall, clutching
for his one sure thing. love
must be spoken whenever
fog clears – who knows what
else may be a/foot. these
women-- wife, daughter, sister --
they must know. let him try
to rephrase it.
let him celebrate her doubled birth
’til his plight’s wild wisdom brings
shock to heel, and grief
grinds to a halt. mercy
is new. every morning.
we cannot walk
with haints before their time.
this was love, this
unmooring, this was the
grasp at truth in another
language, all of these his first:
Happy birthday, honey.
Translation:
Amai –mother
Baba –father
Mukwasha –son-in-law
Ambuya –grandmother
Tete –aunt
Tsitsi Jaji is the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for her second book, Mother Tongues, excerpted here and to be published in 2019. Her first full-length collection, Beating the Graves (African Poetry Book Fund / U Nebraska Press, 2017) was a runner-up for the 2015 Sillerman Prize, and her chapbook, Carnaval, appeared in the first New Generation African Poets box-set. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Harvard Review, Boston Review online, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere. Jaji is a professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. She has taught writing workshops in her home country, Zimbabwe, and is the author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Schomburg Center (NEH), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.