Let's Begin Here
By Linda Susan Jackson
From Volume 4 (2013)
for my husband
1.
Imagine a truth being born,
Imagine it as a series
Of sunrises and surprise,
Imagine it can’t soar away
From its own habits, existing,
Au jour le jour for no apparent
Reason except to turn its own
Verbal problems into equations.
2.
Of course, everything that happens
Has happened before, so let’s begin
Here. Imagine I’m not ready to leave
The sweat fests I’d go to over the next
Five years, lights alternating red then
Blue in Hennie’s $.50 basement parties,
Me dancing to The Manhattans or The
Mad Lads or the begging songs of the
Early O’Jays, ushering in the Philly sound,
Imagine you’d hear how I succumb
To the leonine growl of Levi Stubbs,
Fall flat for the raw and worn, hard-
Stomping sound of The Marvellettes, tearing
Open Motown stories of teenage hope and fire,
Every time The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.
3.
Nature’s stable though she pushes back
And adapts, but let’s begin again, here,
The July after Billy Stewart’s Strange Feeling,
My summer world shifted to the warm, round
Sound of Clifford Brown, whose ballads blew
Deep trumpet lines with Max Roach skinning time.
And Abbey Lincoln, whose baby voice matured
Into rooted moments, carried a gun load of history
In her diction, so sharp, every syllable a blade.
Imagine me being swept up by the muscularity
Of Coleman Hawkins, the brutality of a Ben
Webster stomp. Imagine the necessity
Of Coltrane’s music moving beyond Giant Steps
To begin another conversation. Imagine I flew
From fights at Slugs. Yes, the very spot
Where Lee Morgan was shot, saw
Dust still on the hardwood floor.
But this is beyond beginning here.
4.
Now, if we begin again, in 1971, with a
Man, fresh home from Vietnam, paper
Back copies of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man and Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess,
Each folded in a back pocket of his postal
Uniform pants, buying me, afroed and defiant,
A rainbow ice, imagine a roller coaster, imagine
A ring in a box, wrapped in tissue paper, stuffed
In the toe of a shoe, imagine the roller coaster,
Slowed by speed bumps, as a much smoother road.
5.
So, let’s begin later, much
Later, the summer our son
Is seven, and I begin
To teach him algebra when all
He wants is to ride his bike.
With the early problems, he
Intuits the answers, but I always
Make him do the proofs, brio
For the long haul, when he’ll have
No numbers, when he’ll have
Nothing but letters to prove equality.
6.
Imagine beginning again, here, with my unadorned mind
That once cut a path through smoke on the road, the mind
Now trying to hold onto itself, the mind of a woman
Whose flaws are becoming forgivable fictions,
Imagine them wearing new faces beyond courting,
Naturally knowing that here is the round up
For a free-range woman who learned the strength
Of sides: the lunge, parry, retreat; the tap, tap, tap—
The slurring slide over twelve bars: the woman who lived
Within a triangle of sin, sound and skin. Let us begin.
