Communion: New & Selected Poems

by Primus St. John

Overview

A distinctive and accessible breakout collection which explores family, history, sexuality, and African-American identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556591259
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

"Though we do not believe it yet,
the interior lift is a real life, and
the intangible dreams of people have
a tangible effect on the world."

All the Way Home

The lamps hung like a lynching
In my town.
It was a dark town.
In a dark town,
Light is a ragged scar.
Fright begs that ragged scar.
It begs doorways.

I love that town.
From its lean men
I learned Emotion;
And how to hold that fine edge,
That makes us
people ...

Mrs. Blackwell's
Sold her house.
Since her husband revolved his head,
She wears bright hats
That speak to people.

B.J.'s doing time.
His children betray that time,
By the breathing it takes
To dream through windows.
Mary Lee dreams him letters;
She dreams by heart ...

Now I feel a new scar.
I've left home
And leaned so far,
I'm almost zero.

And though it's lonely,
Whatever knowing is,
It strings a long fine wire.
At night I lie awake
And listen to that wire —

    All the way home.

    Benign Neglect/West Point, Mississippi, 1970

Suppose you were dreaming about your family,
And when you woke up
You found a man named Sonny Stanley
Had just shot you (5 times),
Or justice
Lookedjust like the color your blood was running —
Running wild in the world —
But the world wouldn't see.
Then
You read, somewhere
(I think it's the papers),
If it's a problem, Boy,
We don't have one here;
We don't ask a man to die
Like groceries babbling froth to flies.
But bleeding,
You watch your neighbors
Write away to their windows to
Hide! Hide!
"He's not there. He's not there."
The last sentence?
The last sentence is your Father —
One of the windows ...
"He's not there. He's not there."

Good-bye, Johnny.

Our Lady of Congress

The opposition likes dry poems —
No storms
That are holding hands
The same way
It begins to rain
When we suspect our lives.
The answer to everything
Is a just peace
(So we elected him president),
Or better umbrellas
That are not afraid.
It is an aesthetic form
History has taken,
To adjust time to a seashell
When strong water comes.
So we go back on our lives.
Reliving all of our curves when we were worms.
Caution, inside
Never learns
No poem is listening to our
Lives —
This way,
Not even the earth.

Justice is in stones
With thirst.
Large storms live on weight
And look our way
When the seals are broken.
Water is success
Whispered to stone like slime.
What we are behind our faces
Is a crack that's leaking,
A yell that's lost its body in a shell.
There are no more words
For old Yankee faces like ours
But the luck we have left.

    American Roots: Moral Associations

1 Kinship:
Is embarrassing the wind,
Like dead black boys,
Falling down from the trees,
Then downstream —
On their knees,
Blood like,
Like a rich nation.

2 Metaphor:
Becomes humiliating,
And clean,
Ticking like a ripe machine.
Do not
Bend,
Fold,
Or mutilate me —
This is your future speaking.

3 The air smells so metaphysical
We have accused it —
Of smog,
And lost manhood,
Then all ritual.

4 Whoever wrote:
A view is a mountain speaking
But left the introduction
For the snow,
And accused silence
Of its soul.

5 The whole nation:
Is a stanza of blackness,
A huge white whale,
Faith in space
(Like the newspapers),
And the quiet insistence
We have peace,
And it's your world, brother.

Elephant Rock

We take place in what we believe.
I've memorized that
Because
It's life
And that
Invisible —
If you're thinking in the dark.

Take the line we drew
Around Elephant Rock,
A beginning
That could happen
Any day
You put your thumb
Down
That long block
And saw all neighbors
As trees.

On our side
We kept these
Possibilities:
1. Mount up now
2. You're tenk
3. This country is your trail too

We began to see
Near this rock
What did not look right
In our books,
That presence
Was enough
And

Anyone who worked
Should be free
To meet himself —
Sometime.

We called it
Cowboys and Indians
Or
The girls should stay home
It's safe that way.
But every day this
Mythology
Grew
We'd lose time
And we'd lose.

One day, Jerry said
Believe —
Go ahead
Believe.

We tried —
To keep the thin trails,
Old trees,
But there's something wrong
With America —
If you're Black
Believe —
Go ahead
Believe.

These three were the most creative:
Breno Jones
He left five kids,
And a thin, incredible wife.
Duke
He was never lucky,
He just died
     &
Jerry too,
OD'd
At the feet of Elephant Rock ...

And because even this is not enough,
Something else
Over their heads
That still takes place
In America.
Old walls
     &
Tall rocks
With that sign
I could never understand —
JESUS SAVES

Table of Contents

from SKINS ON THE EARTH
I All the Way Home	5
Benign Neglect/West Point, Mississippi, 1970	7
Our Lady of Congress	8
American Roots: Moral Associations	10
Elephant Rock	12
Oluranti	15
A Splendid Thing Growing	16
He Imagined the Gorgeous Pattern of the New Skin and
Settled for America	18
Strike One, Strike Two: A Savage Song	20
The Holy Ghost Will Not Materialize	21
II The Violence of Pronoun	23
Water Can Only Wrap Me, but Life Must Hold Me	25
Eloma	26
Esom	27
For These Conditions There Is No Abortion	28
Laborer	30
Indeed	31
Bedding Down	32
The Carpenter	33
After the Truckers' Restaurant	35
Two Voices from Hester Street (1904)	36
III Tyson's Corner	39
Constellations	40
Southern Comfort: A Gentleman	42
Lynching and Burning	44
Looking at a Bus Stop	45
Into the Open Heart	46
Survival	47
The Dark God of Roses	48
IV The Morning Star	52
The Fountain	53
Field	54
Biological Light	56
Westward Expansion	58
A Poem to My Notebook, Across Winter	59
Waking	60
from LOVE IS NOT A CONSOLATION; IT IS A LIGHT
I from Postcards: A Metaphysical Journey	65
II Love and the Healing: 2	69
Ambiguities	71
III Lyric 4	73
Lyric 5	73
Lyric 6	73
IV Notes on a Painter's Palette	75
Lyric 7	81
Lyric 8	81
V Reading a Story to My Child	83
Like van Gogh, I Can't Begin in Prose	87
Turning from the National Geographic to Peer out the
Window	91
Lyric 10	93
Lyric 11	95
Lyric 12	95
VI 25 Exposures	97
Lyric 13	101
Lyric 14	102
VII Ocean of the Streams of Story	104
Love Poem 4	106
Love Poem 6	106
DREAMER
I "We came to know each other"	109
"That day"	111
"When the butterflies appear"	113
"Today"	114
"I think I will make the man thin"	116
"I told her to go outside"	119
"I was to become a Bajan"	120
"What do stories do?"	121
II Dreamer	125
III That in Itself Is the Proverb	152
Sunday	154
We Are Going to Be Here Now	155
Lord, Man	157
Tale	159
Once	161
Worship	162
Focus	163
Talk	165
Dread	168
Pearle's Poem	170
Pentecostal	172
Song	173
Carnival	175
Textual Notes to Dreamer	176
IF THERE WERE NO DAYS, WHERE WOULD WE LIVE
I After That	181
Yellow Sweet Clover	182
At Colm's Foot	182
The Waterfall	183
Anniversary	183
The Sniper	184
There Are Always Fish Here	185
Signing	186
Why	187
May, Age 2	188
Dancing with Wolves	188
Water Carrier	189
By the Mule River	190
Ripe	191
Aubade	192
Call It What You Want	193
Obsessions Are Important	194
Ironing	197
Lemon Verbena	198
Ars Poetica	199
¿Qué Pasa?	200
All This	201
The End of the Beginning of the Story	202
Nelson	203
Maps	204
Kindling	204
Good Night	205
Things That Are Like Butterflies	205
Fire Starters	206
Lists	206
Teo & Monacita	207
Getting Ready to Talk about Metaphors & Similes on
Valentine's Day	208
A Story	209
Listening to the Curandera	210
Wind	211
The Marathon	211
The Wily Cover-Thief's Tale	212
II If There Were No Days, Where Would We Live	214
About the Author	233

Editorial Reviews

St. Johns idiosyncratic and evocative collection moves with a Stein-like sense of aphorism whose verbal play (Vase: / And water are righteousness) often depends on a violence of political associationsThe lamps hung like a lynching/ In my townor on the absurdity of freedom of choice: Mr. Anderson delivers the Stars/ And never has to say anything.// I vote for Mr. Anderson. St. Johns glibness makes his opacity seem more off-handed than significant, but at their best, his multivocal experiments confront the semi-conscious roots of radical change. Dreamer, about slave ship captain-cum-abolitionist John Newton, trolls fragmented, consciousness-laden waters, allowing the poet to envision a highly personal set of conditions that might permit revolution: All the colors are conjurers when our/ mysteries are being solved. And if this could/ not be his dream then by now it should be ours. And in poems like Survival, St. John achieves a caligraphic, haunting efficacy: Where is my father?/ Black got the man,/ Deep inside,/ All by himself. St. John, who along with four other poets inauguarated the Poets in the Schools program, seems to search for a productive relationship between his art and politics, and the results are often powerful. (May)

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