White Man

Blue-eyed Christ
Breaking white bread in white hands,
Your body becomes the four quarters.
Your savannah obeah
Summons me here.

This world is the privilege of my eyes,
Lit by the glow of Greek statues,
From the Caucasus to the Congo.
We are the living ghosts
Walking across Africa,
The pale dead speaking in tongues.

To map the skin’s country
I pace and survey,
Measuring horizon’s gravity.
What do the gods desire of us ?
Ask the trees and rocks.

Fierce blood, dark in the vein,
Return me to stone,
Renew me again.
Nobody knows me,
Nobody has ever known me:
White shadows jitter and jag in my brain.
All this talk of flesh and spirit
Is driving me insane.

The darkness wills me to possess it,
Who am myself possessed.
Suffer and fall,
And count yourself blessed.

White on white,
Sly hues contend,
Portending the pure,
The exempt.

Here I am,
In the pink,
Waiting to be told
What to think.

Can I chase out the demons
With baptism, with confirmation,
With communion, with penance, with extreme unction,
With marriage, with white death ?

Get back to the mountains
Where the air is cold and clear,
And the eye can see forever.
Roll in the snow, get clean again,
Your body made of stars.

The ape exults in the forest,
Smelling the earth’s arousal,
And makes his prayers in blood
And bone, in hot spurting seed.

Asses’ milk or ceruse
Poison black Cleopatra,
Statuesque before her mirror
In a palace in Africa.

Dirt and sin call me
To confess myself in them,
To revel in their carnival
And laugh through tears.

This white shows the dirt all too clearly,
Yet flatters the self-deceiving.

This transparency you crave is all absence,
Chaste deadliness of Nothing incarnate,
Immaculate, impeccable,
Ecstasy of the unreal.

Light from above
Illuminates us against a white ground,
Conjuring spirits and angels
With its deft wand.