The Gilded Auction Block Read online

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  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Sylvia and Nicholas and Eden

  Was it a whim of fortune,

  Or was I hard to find?

  What’s the routine of a man with a gun?

  Was it a kind of torture?

  Have you been out of town?

  What is it like to a man with a gun?

  —STINA NORDENSTAM

  What starts on the ground will end up

  soaking into the ground forever.

  —ANNE CARSON

  THE PRESIDENT VISITS THE STORM

  “What a crowd! What a turnout!”

  —DONALD TRUMP, TO VICTIMS OF HURRICANE HARVEY

  America you’re what a turnout great

  Crowd a great crowd big smiles America

  The hurricane is everywhere but here an

  Important man is talking here Ameri-

  ca the important president is talking

  And if the heavens open up the heavens

  Open above the president the heavens

  Open to assume him bodily into heaven

  As they have opened to assume great men

  Who will come back and bring the end with them

  America he trumpets the end of your

  Suffering both swan and horseman trumpeting

  From the back of the beast the fire and rose are one

  On the president’s bright head the flames implanted

  To make a gilded crown America

  The hurricane is everywhere but here

  America a great man is a poison

  That kills the sky the weather in the sky

  For who America can look above him

  You’re what a great a crowd big smiles the ratings

  The body of a storm is a man’s body

  It has an eye and everything in the eye

  Is dead a calm man is a man who has

  Let weakness overcome his urge for death

  America the president is talking

  You’re what a great a turnout you could be

  Anywhere but your anywhere is here

  And every inch of the stadium except those

  Feet occupied by the stage after his speech will

  Be used to shelter those displaced by the storm

  Except those feet occupied by the they’re

  Armed folks police assigned to guard the stage

  Which must remain in place for the duration

  Of the hurricane except those feet of dead

  Unmarked space called The Safety Zone between

  Those officers and you you must not vi-

  olate The Safety Zone you must not leave

  The Safety Zone the president suggests

  You find the edge it’s at a common sense

  Distance it is farther than you can throw

  A rock no farther than a bullet flies

  1

  I FIGHT HIM (ANN PARKER)

  I fell and broke my arm some time ago

  ’Cause my right side am dead and me

  I tries to crawl / Off’n the bed

  I is a hundred three years old

  When I gets back from the hospital

  They ties me in this chair

  I was a grown

  Woman at the end of the war

  The boy who helps me up and down

  He wasn’t raised like me he don’t / Got the same manners

  but / We old ones know we still is got to be polite

  To you white ladies

  Daughter did I tell you

  My mammy Junny was a queen in Africa

  And I ain’t had no daddy

  ’Cause queens don’t marry yes / She was a queen

  And when she told them at the farm

  They bowed

  She told them not to tell it tell the master and they didn’t tell

  But when the white folks wasn’t lookin’ / She was a queen

  The boy who ties and

  Unties the rope he / Says it don’t matter who my mammy was

  now that we’s free

  He fusses and I fight him and

  he says a queen don’t act that way

  Daughter you make sure you tell him

  ’Cause he don’t know

  And you don’t know

  A queen won’t die a slave

  EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BLACKNESS I LEARNED FROM DONALD TRUMP

  “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

  —DONALD TRUMP

  America I was driving when I heard you

  Had died I swerved into a ditch and wept

  In the dream I dreamed unconscious in the ditch

  America I dreamed you climbed from the ditch

  You must believe your body is and any

  Body and stood beside the ditch for eight years

  Thinking except you didn’t stand you right

  Away lay down on your pale belly

  And tried to claw your way back to the ditch

  You right away began to wail and weep

  And gnash your teeth my tears met yours in the ditch

  America they carry me downstream

  A slave on the run from you an Egyptian queen

  And even in my dreams I’m in your dreams

  BLACK JOE ARPAIO

  America you wouldn’t pardon me

  Even if I was truly I was sorry

  Even if I had worked so hard and truly

  To keep the Mexicans on the other side

  Of the river even if I had myself

  Built turrets on a wall I built myself

  Complete with searchlights and machine guns white

  Men chewing toothpicks as they scanned the brown

  Horizon either through binoculars

  Or aviator sunglasses the on-

  ly sign of the expressions on their faces

  Would be their teeth you wouldn’t pardon me

  Even if I had locked every freeway down

  And every highway every street and road

  And backroad every drive down with police check-

  points even if I had made sure each cop wore his

  No women aviator sunglasses

  And mustache as he swept his flashlight first

  Across your backseat then across your feet

  Then shone it in your eyes and asked for papers

  Even if I had brought to life that dream

  You at your bedside pray each night to have A-

  merica you wouldn’t pardon me I know

  Whoever makes your dream suffers your dream

  DISPLAY FOOD

  “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

  —DONALD TRUMP

  America the lights along the highway

  At night the streetlights look just like the eyelets

  At the edge of the tarp behind which Kim Jong-un

  Himself det
ains the sun America

  From you I drive beneath them seeking you

  And in what other country America

  Could I within the country seek the country

  And find it nowhere but the citizens are

  Told in the citizens the country fails

  America I am becoming white

  In the white light in flashes no one knows

  And still for every inch my afro grows

  I wait a minute longer at the Wal-

  mart deli but I find the real you there

  Where what you see will not be what you eat

  SONNET FOR DESIREE FAIROOZ PROSECUTED FOR LAUGHING AT JEFF SESSIONS’ CONFIRMATION HEARING

  “Jeff Sessions’ extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”

  —SENATOR RICHARD SHELBY

  America I’m laughing can you hear me

  I’m laughing when I heard you say you weren’t

  Racist because you shared a hotel room

  On more than one occasion with a black

  Lawyer I’m laughing while you worked to keep him

  From voting can you hear me when I heard

  You say you liked the KKK until

  You learned the Knights smoke pot I’m laughing

  America when I heard you say it was good

  News for the South you are America

  Good news for the South I’m laughing when I heard

  You say that after the Supreme Court broke

  The Voting Rights Act please tell it again

  America tell me the one I’m living

  WE’LL GO NO MORE A ROVING

  —GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, ALTHOUGH I FIRST ENCOUNTERED IT IN A SETTING BY GEORGE WALKER, THE FIRST BLACK COMPOSER TO WIN THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MUSIC

  We’ll go no more a roving from

  Our bodies love who once had roamed

  So far as almost to have been

  The owners of our bodies then

  And not their property we’ll go

  No more from the master’s fields and no

  More love we will we lay no more

  The master’s gaze and yoke we bear

  Down in green grass that is grass green

  The grass will take now from our skin

  Its colors and become us love our

  Browns will be all the Earth’s wild colors

  We’ll go no more a roving now

  Except as the mule roves with the plow

  The white stars make the endless black

  A night the master calls us back

  AFTER CARRIE KINSEY’S LETTER TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  A colored man

  came and he said he would

  Take care of him

  good care and pay me five

  Dollars a month his name is my

  Brother he is

  about fourteen years old his name is James

  Robinson and the man who took him his

  Name is Dan Cal

  Five dollars for his labor his

  Name is Dan Cal

  I didn’t know

  The man before but now

  I know him I has heard of him

  From folks in town and from

  elsewhere in the county in town

  passing through

  He sold my brother to

  a white man named MacRee

  They has been working him in prison for twelve month

  And they won’t send him back to me

  he has

  No mother and no father Mr. President they are

  both dead / I am his only friend

  My brother have not done

  Nothing for them to have him in

  Chains and I saw no money

  I believe Dan Cal lives high on it

  He does if any colored man gets

  money for / A colored man’s work

  Mr. President but I will tell you I believe no

  Colored man does / Colored folks don’t

  make money we make food

  For other folks to eat

  And air for other folks to breathe

  Excepting colored folks don’t

  make those things we are those things we are food we are air

  I mend a white man’s coat I am his coat

  With every stitch I stitch my skin on tighter

  Even when we sell ourselves

  Colored folks don’t make money but we are white people’s money

  Dan Cal is a white man’s dollar

  By now my brother

  is a pile of rocks

  I know they got him breaking rocks

  With every rock

  He breaks he breaks himself

  and he is more himself

  Like he was always meant to be

  that pile of rocks

  But I’m afraid I wouldn’t know him if I saw him now

  I write for you to help me

  I know you must be

  Busy but it / Wouldn’t be nothing for you

  Mr. President you

  Are no one’s dollar but your own

  PURCHASE

  America I was born incapable

  Of owning what I work for even but

  It doesn’t it never mattered doesn’t mat-

  ter where I went to school or where I teach

  Or who America still my life belongs to

  Somewhere a some white person who can’t live it

  Because I’m living it America

  And they would live it better easier

  The way the maybe the professor would

  Or maybe he was staff at Oberlin

  The white man who as I was walking to

  Wearing a hoodie to a meeting in

  A building which was at the time a crew was

  Repairing he stepped up to me and asked

  So are you guys just drying out the floor here

  How but with my life can I answer him

  Who calls me down from the gilded auction block

  IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING

  “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person…”

  —DONALD TRUMP

  America I dreamed I looked at Auntie

  Maxine and knew from looking what she was

  How smart she was and also her whole fami-

  ly what they were and what they could be is

  You my dream coming true America

  No dream I’ve dreamed of you would come true good

  Though I have dreamed as good as you and you

  Have often you have often told me dreamed

  The best dream for at least for almost one

  Third of the declining years of your short life

  You’ve often dreamed the best for me and mine

  And I have seen your best and dreamed it of-

  ten good still in my dreams I see instead

  Through the eyes you’ve placed in the back of my head

  THE ROLE OF THE NEGRO IN THE WORK OF ART

  America I shower in the bright-

  est bathroom in the house but it’s the bathroom

  With the lowest water pressure most of the time

  Your mighty rivers dribble down my chest and

  Back in “The Dry Salvages” T. S. El-

  iot describes “the river with its car-

  go of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops”

  Because the river is like time Ameri-

  ca a “destroyer” and “preserver” and

  Like time America it’s swollen with what

  You eat most of the time I don’t feel like

  I’m getting clean your rivers dribble in

  Bright light preserver and destroyer when

  I am seen how will I survive being seen

  THE BROWN HORSE ARIEL

  Nigger-eye

  Berries cast dark

  Hooks—

  —SYLVIA PLATH

  Nigger-eye I so dark when I was young

  I
said to anyone and my-

  self who would listen they were black black black not

  Black like the pink of my pink palms

  But black like no i- ris all pupil black

  Black like you’d see a student who

  Won’t study like I see you riding by

  Sing-shouting nigger-eye and mak-

  er I lament for thee and read thee still

  Black like the fear of death confounds me

  Black like I named one black eye Fear one Death

  Black like the brown horse Ariel

  Who could not know himself until he knew his rider

  AFTER A PHOTOGRAPH OF A TOWN HOUSE IN THE LAFAYETTE PARK RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT DETROIT

  Residents would be able, at [low] cost, to live in apartments and units designed by a leading architect and to walk th[r]ough a sylvan setting on their way to work in downtown Detroit. This not only promised to retain a middle-class population in the city but ridded the downtown area of slum-like housing and its black residents.

  —CITY OF DETROIT HISTORIC DESIGNATION BOARD

  A giant videotape a VHS

  Cassette abandoned in a forest the

  Flap broken off the black tape is exposed

  And the brown trees turn black in it the tree

  Barely a tree nearest the tape and almost

  But not as tall the darkest tree with the palest

  Green leaves of all the trees the farthest from the

  Lens of the camera almost at the center

  Of the picture its trunk is so dark it dis-

  appears in the tape the pale leaves seem to float

  Although the trunk is visible in the pic-

  ture in front of the tape where does the black

  Body begin to disappear it dis-

  appears somewhere between itself in the world and

  Itself in the tape so that it’s not itself in

  The tape but void from which spring the pale shoots

  AWAITING THE GUNS

  Daughter the drums and bagpipes pound and wail

  And carry across the only park you’ll call

  A park that isn’t half a swing set half

  A jungle gym and as I lean in close to