Phillip Shabazz: 3 Poems
Walnut Street
1.
Diogenes begs for alms from a statue
to pick up the practice of being refused.
Anything the stone gives returns to a smoky
wineglass, and the 1950s belong to my father.
Wavy-haired like Eckstine, coat a tattered tweed.
Wigged out once more, he wanders cloudy-eyed
dirt stung by the new Walnut Street night. He can’t
keep his hands off the cards at a poker table. Breeze
silk a high roller, he outfoxed the sharks to bluff,
steal the blinds, bully to scoop up the pot. Only now,
he has no dollars in chips left to carry him. The game is
a cigarette butt in an ashtray. What’s left of his wine
lags languid in outcast, where to play god, Dixie demolished
his 7-block mecca, knocked down his 100 buildings,
barb wired his space from 6th to 13th Streets to drive him out
of the downtown district. Like a windchill in an ache
his fingers stiffen. Can’t help but thorn into frostbite.
Ice cuts into his sky, whitens his breath come the stars.
What strips the bone lasts longer than his time faithless
memories thinner than crumbs.
2.
My father is the old Walnut Street, burgeoning on a Friday
buzz. Off the bench at a bus stop, his eagle flies as he cashes
his paycheck. Time to dine out over cocktails, work his mojo
to bring in more bread from a hustle. A poker stash fattens
his pockets. Proof an emptiness shrinks like the corn mint
oil in a cigarette with its filter. At the table he has left
Diogenes on his knees clinging to the statue, an idol tree changing color.
In smoke the 1950s close into his eyes. Still, he clutches
the cards, nothing to nobody, clutches the afterhours—
a hand appears, disappears. An ace of spades is found, is lost
in drifting gray, drafts its hole sideways, a skinless arm
which holds him. Trip without panic. The school-boy scotch
wets his mouth, takes him with it on a ship, a cruise
to a named elsewhere he did not name.
3.
Anything the stone gives returns to a crack, a cobweb,
a weed running game in the sidewalk. The wine hardens
into a stain on my father’s tweed. Dust dries on his empty
glass bottle sitting on a windowsill. The break in his
stingy-brim has gone absent since the last days of old Walnut Street.
Straight ahead distance is wine on his lips he cannot taste.
A shark cut short of water the way happiness and memory
flies apart into winds of light. His hand has no king
no queen to play. How he won’t stop wandering off alone
after nine at night in a street no longer his street.
His cigarette slants all its smoke
to the begging hand of Diogenes,
and the statue, moon-eyed, staring down at him.
All Along the Way
Under a sky bed, I think. If my father were here,
we’d wing up the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Go flying on four wheels over Grandfather Mountain
where the rock weeds a melody on maple tree sap.
Sunlight amasses into deep woods
and blooms the five flowers of Mother Mary.
This is nowhere near to being a ghost town
of empty gas meters murmuring
between the rust obsessed by silence.
My father is a shadow close enough to my arm
to touch the skin and stay in touch,
the way a misty rouse of waterfalls splash
and drown out human fatigue, failure.
Maybe his hands would find these moon vistas cool.
Eyes open like maps. Appalachian ridges
dig its boulders of moment
pulling down the figments of stars to itself.
I call it my nascent side.
Shut out nothing. Catch how Pomade
wax shines in his hair like a purple
stick of gage sparks when it’s lit.
Where we go gives a clue of what’s happening
inside the headwind staggering along
the corners we turn. White noise
birddogs the channel surf of AM radio
as if it is time to just listen to the wind.
I whisk around the longleaf pine
which allows the butterflies of sunflower
fields and wiregrass to air through me.
What does it mean to turn my face toward his face
that isn’t here? Maybe he’s there, somewhere
facing the memory of my face
like a mirror in a silver puddle.
Even the rippling rivers read my thoughts.
Then render rain gardens of April.
The topography a tangled
labyrinth elevates each green blade
in the wild, and the earthbound flash
of flesh in spring. I have not slept
in a sky bed, leaving me in its wake of stone edges.
But I know how to ride these wheels
with my father
and hold the sunset up to his face
like a teardrop flame from a lighter.
How I see him made of everything
a vessel filled inside out
in the clear he enters,
in the cloud he exits.
After the Hours
The old world, a dead dog, drags his night
air by the feet through this town.
He releases the feathered fog of dandelions,
dismembers history as dust, his crevices clouded
on the needle after the hours. Dumped snake
skins in piles find sweat dripped on the glass.
Dirty money and satellites darkened his eye.
Rainbow or the liquor store: searching wall-to-wall
for a fix. The bottom side of a bagman’s foot stomp
has stopped with his Wingtips cut out of cobblestone.
Juke joints sparkle. Glitzy beetles deploy their gleam.
His marquee blinks names. Shadowed by moonlight,
numb to barred owls, he lowers the jungle of his eye
from the posh, red star glow toward double deck
buses, casinos jangling slot machines after the hours.
He chases a bag to be the cat caught in a sling.
How the moon grinds to a seed, the old world tastes
sour to him who thought it would be honey glazed.
Phillip Shabazz is the author three collections of poetry, and a novel in verse. His poems have been included in the anthologies Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont: A Guidebook and Home Is Where: African-American Poetry from the Carolinas. He works as a poet-in-the-schools in North Carolina. Previous publication credits include: Across The Margin, Impspired, Fine Lines, Galway Review, Obsidian, Hamilton Stone Review, and Louisville Review.