My name is Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.
This poem is called “Migration.”
“If I see something happening which I like,
I let it happen...” -Jacob Lawrence
“If it’s love flowing freely,
I’m ready.” -Tracy Chapman
Black is an ardor.
Color moving as wholeness—
yellow migrates blouse to light
handle to bell green
migrates button to satchel to wall
blue migrates coat to sea
to night sky—finds an order.
Black is an ardor
of smokestack cirrus bird flight
blanket boll stem.
Against spike head slipper
judge robe noose rope—: Hair.
Fatback sliced on a table
is a block of pink stripes falling
open as a story’s pages
bout to be sliced and served.
Please, pass me the last bit
of summer. August’s green glide
into overlays of gold
shivers of goldenrod borders
against a shirring sun-gilt pond.
Here I sit.
See if you can’t find Jacob’s process
in the snake-anxious way
I crossed the grass to get at shade—
I’m still southern— in the silver grey whisper
of underleaf the breeze brings up.
Green is a table upon which that narrative
of pig and hunger sits until green
is the sky at the top of a labor camp stairwell
holding the moon. Or is green the door
the yellow moon a large bright knob
to turn to exit these quarters?
If yellow is a question—:
of travel of red of orange alerts—:
key suddenly something from the bottom of the pond
something as simple as caution or koi—:
at first one giant one.
Then the vibrancy beneath the surface splits.
Its forty fish making that orange glide == divide.
I realize— and one flips its silver-bellied self
out of the water— praise my recognition— belied.
I’m dying to say each soul almost isosceles
in her flair, in his onward press
slants in slant rhyme to Mississippi’s mouth—:
if I’m lying I’m dying to count
every dropped leaf every spent petal
towards black potential—:
say pre- historic swamp heat—
black process burns
a fossil fuel. Say peat—
to make a seam—
the total black pealing outside St. Louis all week
beneath a hard blue repetition—:
young black men dealt death ==
unseemly.
What’s true about this man at 23?
He’s gone: to books in fall,
to studio in spring
gessoing boards with Gwendolyn
with whiting and rabbit skin glue to keep
the fibers of a story in his head
set when it’s cooled and dried.
He moves to set its rhythms to a palette
set its tones in casein colors.
What it means to move—: prepare.
Then let the living thing beneath a scene
still breathing breathe, as memory does,
alive, beneath the egg, and milk,
and pigment—:
Four hours in the street a body lies
between dimensions—: Jacob’s :— north
whose figment the finished :— panels draw him—:
south :— he flies...
Write about movement where it is most still.
Black is arduous: in riot a raised baton
in burning building what’s behind the cracked window.
The SWAT van that appeared suddenly and sat for twenty minutes
outside your house drove you from porch to pond.
You wondered where a sister might find some peace
though you know you never use the word sister like that.
You wrote where I sister might find some peace
then revised it.
You’re telling the truth—a correction.
The I in you corrects.
It rises like something from the deep.
You’re not even at the pond anymore
but still you want to feel outside
like you want to write rise over run.
Like water you’re in a rush to work some delta in
if you’re me
Dirt moves you.
In music the dirty writhes you
further into this writing—
prof you are the proof is in the Plies
though it’s hard to admit.
How his what that mean tickles your
that—: means you :— recognize
What you do to me baby
it never gets out of me
You want him in the picture so write him too
through Jacob’s rows.
Like flames of green crop streak squash blossomed color
stripes soil go with your ratchet—:
Negro who had been part of the soil...
now going into and leaving a new life in the urban centers—:
go with what moves you.
What you do to me baby
it never gets out of me
Reaching ...2...3...4...
pigtailed girls at a chalkboard, stretch reach.
Mark this black—: river this :—
Black is == an ardor, from dirt summer
scent of slate scratched up—
Rock with what moves black bodies
What you do to me baby’s beyond chalk borders
Freely filling its it it’s == black]
black [-fully free
it never gets out of me.