After
I left you I flew straight to Dakar,
six hours across the Sahara.
On the road from the airport,
pictures of Marvin Gaye in his
knitted cap, on his face such a complex
mixture of tenderness and scorn,
he became at that moment
my patron saint of you.
Despair is distance from the physical.
Later, this becomes obvious. When it doesn’t enter
as any pain you know, rather like
leprosy: blue hand you no longer recognize
as your own.
Then: downtown Dakar. Women raking yards of red
earth, cheap plastic boom-boxes from
Korea playing Sexual Healing, the mufti of the Mourids
who travel for a year or two or
five for the song of the God, the spirit
that enters.
I did not know what I would miss—
happy to wake up in that sluiced white light,
drinks on the veranda of the Café Lucita
or the Royale Palm by the Corniche,
a black cliff crumbling down to the sea.
One night in Ville de Ouakam,
men danced outside a boxing arena
their faces slicked with chalk. How old
was that music? The click in my head
that made me hear it as if it were in me—
the flashlight held to my
mouth so I could glimpse the spaces
of my body. The you I had swallowed down
like radium, enduring/
decaying through lives and
half-lives, the dense traces
like shrapnel under the skin,
the click in the click, the click —
like a seashell, the blood/the sea, the lack
of difference between
them. Years later I kept a postcard from Dakar
on the mirror of my medicine cabinet. I never wrote
you, you never wrote me. Or only:
It is too late, enfin. It is too. Enfin.
We are made of stories
you told me once. The arc that loops as long
as the breath and every story
robs something from us just as we cannot
walk through a room without
leaving pieces of our skin.
When the body no longer seemed
relevant, the postcard moved to over
my bed. Drug-thick at night in the streetlight
glow, I would watch it:
A picture of sand. A picture of a man
walking across it. Where was he
going? Where had be been?
The landscape so blasted you would think
nothing could survive,
but there he was, his cotton robes — his
robes of bassein—
swilled around him
like dissolved flesh, liquid,
beautiful.
— sheila black