For Etheridge Knight (1931—March 10, 1991)

Break — heart, in your madness —
rejoice in nothing that is — tomorrow's
the day Etheridge goes down deeper than sleep —
he's gone out today like thin air —
his life-force breath and spirit freed
from the poor tortured body in disease
will never sing again —
what garbage this world is —
heaped up plastic circuit lies
and foam-rubber elastics
stinking like deaths that can not be
without what you sing —
Mississippi blues and mosquito rivers run
and carry you miles like the speaking drum
mantra of flesh — bone — skin — tones —

            ...your echo calls me, then as now
to say to them what you told me —
but the no-good Nile and ravaged Hudson run
like bodies of glass
bearing industrial mass —
without your breathing voice anymore
the trees crack like old factory panes
and the leaves bleed through black acid holes
made by chemical rain falls —
the inhuman moon loves no one anymore...
Old friend — for the spirit of the wood,
for the beauty that made you immortal
for the end — the speaking
and the hearing drums pound us all
away into the tongue of purest sound —
poet of soul-blues/jazz and song
I know too well how I miss you now,
first sayer of the sooth-said psalm that gave
my voice liberty to swing
when you said: “Just SAY a poem...”
and I heard your echoing power
in each thing of this life-world...

            And now all night in tiny pieces I remember
how much hope and strength you lent me,
your voice deep and gentle as explosions under sea
as oral wisdom humbles hyperliteracy,
I heard your South with awe,
your America a horrorshow of laws —
you knew all along how heady poets jam
images like waters pushing over a dam
(and it AIN'T got that swing
to mean any DAMNED meaning thing) —
how poems for the page are aimed
into linear ages that never arrive —
their futures never mature into now —

            Speaker of truths —
what else can you be?...
Sainthood's too high
and prisons make a faith of abuse —
You believed in your self enough to open the deep
and sweet cells of the heart even in ruins
no one could bear — your voice like a thunderhead
made so many leaves tremble
to answer your gale with words —
So many times you started over from scratches
deep enough to kill ten men —
I hear your grasp of hungry pain,
its pulsing rhyme of clash
like ragtime tiger pianos —
there every note strikes — hammering bone —

            The world becomes criminally insane
without you beating its cinder-block walls —
without your refraining voice
ringing out what must be —
telling/tolling to become
all you survived — transformed
creating glories from agonies —
but terrible beauties free-born,
music of the mired-shit of foreign wars,
so crises/politics/presidents
become no lies, no liars, but resonance —
a triumph no next wind can unhinge,
your greatness pouring melody
to and from what never changes
and changes every thing...
Faithful to the abuses of these killing times,
you lynch the stone-deaf denial in us all,
you string up love's pain with laughter
piercing your own heart —
the first act of love...

            You make milquetoast critics cringe
as if human experience had reached in —
as if your experience were also human —
like Gwendolyn Brooks asked about universality:
‘Isn't black experience part of the universe?'
But the harmony of this universe
is part ripped out now,
and only remembering you, without you —
yet your soul can sing:
“so my soul can sing...”

I didn't know till this moment
there was anyone who'd make me cry
            by just dying —
I'd forgotten how to remember love
till this moment
            of breaking —
I thought I was hollow as a chime
but at this touch my space
            is screaming
out of the blues into the brackish
white-water and the black
            sea of you —

Etheridge,
Take heart in your madness —
Rejoice — even when there's
nothing to fill the spaces
women leave behind in the air
when they're gone —
Rejoice even when you say
“What's the use of talking to myself
when I've heard it all before?”
Rejoice — because the heart
is mad for liquid joy —
and asking what love is
makes loving into retrospecting —
In the air you left for me
the space is my own palm
now pressed like a seashell
telling its roar —
Rejoice — fires burn only the cold.
One wave follows its brother,
and till I see you as another, Rejoice...

Published in the chapbook, Strangers in a Homeland (Ashland Poetry Press, 2001); anthologized in And What Rough Beast: Poems for the End of the Century (Anthology, Ashland Poetry Press, 1999), and first published in African-American Review (Vol. 28, No. 4, 1994).