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My father was an enormous man

Who believed kindness and lack of size

Were nothing more than sissified

Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded,

 

His eyes were the worst kind

Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard.

No one could outshout him

Or make bigger fists. The few

 

Who tried got taken for bad,

Beat down, their bodies slammed.

I wanted to be just like him:

Big man, man of the house, king.

 

A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit,

I learned to use my hands watching him

Use his, pretending to slap mother

When he slapped mother.

 

He was sick. A diabetic slept

Like a silent vowel inside his well-built,

Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that

With similar weaknesses

 

—I discovered writing,

How words are parts of speech

With beats and breaths of their own.

Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam!

 

An heir to the rhythm

And tension beneath the beatings,

My first attempts were filled with noise,

Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows.

 

The page tightened like a drum

Resisting the clockwise twisting

Of a handheld chrome key,

The noisy banging and tuning of growth.

A white substitute teacher

At an all-Black public high school,

He sought me out saying my poems

Showed promise, range, a gift,

And had I ever heard of T.S. Eliot?

No. Then Robert Hayden perhaps?

 

Hayden, a former colleague,

Had recently died and the obituary 

He handed me had already begun

Its journey home—from the printed page

Back to the tree, gray becoming

Yellow, flower, dirt.

 

No river, we skipped rocks 

On the horizon, above Ground Zero,

From the roof of the Gibson Plaza Apartments.

We’d aim, the shout the names

Of the museums, famous monuments,

And government buildings

 

Where our grandparents, parents,

Aunts, and uncles worked. Dangerous duds.

 

The bombs we dropped always fell short,

Missing their mark. No one, not even

Carlton Green who had lived in

As many neighborhoods as me,

 

Knew in which direction

To launch when I lifted Hayden’s

Place of employment—

The Library of Congress—

From the obituary, now folded

In my back pocket, a creased map.

 

We went home, asked our mothers,

But they didn’t know. Richard’s came 

Close: Somewhere near Congress,

On Capitol Hill, take the 30 bus, 

Get off before it reaches Anacostia,

Don’t cross the bridge into Southeast.

 

The next day in school 

I looked it up—the National Library 

Of the United States in Washington, D.C.

Founded in 1800, open to all taxpayers 

And citizens. Snap! My Aunt Doris 

Works there, has for years. 

 

Once, on her day off, she 

Took me shopping and bought

The dress shoes of my choice.

Loafers. They were dark red, 

Almost purple, bruised—the color

Of blood before oxygen reaches it. 

 

I was beginning to think

Like a poet, so in my mind

Hayden’s dying and my loafers

Were connected, but years apart,

As was Dunbar to other institutions—

Ones I could see, ones I could not.