Thylias Moss

[anirbas]

Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton

by Thylias Moss
[excerpted from
her book Slave Moth--a stellar
narrative in verse, well worth the read!]

I haven't seen the sea before
but it must be easy to love

because even without ever seeing it before
I call the blown-open cotton a sea,
I call moving through the rows
my attempt to walk on rough water.

It's not that the cotton seems watery
or that each cotton seed hair is like
a separate one of the sparkles the sun makes
when its light bounces in moving water,

--though it is like that
now that I think about it.

It's just how big
the cotton is. This small field

seems bigger than the sky,
and is the sky for ants. It's just

how the cotton carries you,
delivers you on a rocky shore,
shipwrecks you,

strands you

even though you can't argue
against what good it does

because you have been taken up in
the persuasion of a garment, of a cocoon.

I've been thinking about this.
While I'm working, I think
about this. My mind is the part of me
that gets the least rest.

It's never quiet;
there's always the hum
inside of me, the hive free inside me
making me think about honey, dipping
all my thoughts into honey

and even the thoughts honey won't
stick to have been in the honey,
have been next to honey so the knowledge
of honey is on them and the knowledge
all by itself is sweet enough.

I think about that, think how thinking
can be sweet enough

for now. Thinking about, thinking about
so much that is buried in the cotton.

Few months after we planted it,
I called the pink blooms of cotton before it ripened
an assualt of endless sunset on the ocean.

[anirbas]

ALL IS NOT LOST WHEN DREAMS ARE

1.
The dreams float like votive lilies
then melt.

It is the way they sing
going down that I envy and to hear it

I could not rescue them. A dirge
reaches my ears like a corkscrew of smoke
And it sits behind my eyes like a piano roll
Some say this is miracle water
None say dreams made it so

2.
Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for
And flew out of the stream
It was not dreaming
It had no ambition but confusion

In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun
and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl
when it's broiled

The Titanic is the one that got away.

~Thylias Moss

[anirbas]

TORNADOS

Truth is, I envy them
not because they dance; I out jitterbug them
as I'm shuttled through and through legs
strong as looms, weaving time. They
do black more justice than I, frenzy
of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair
on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release
the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played

instead of notes. The movement
is not wrath, not hormone swarm because
I saw my first forming above the church a surrogate
steeple. The morning of my first baptism and
salvation already tangible, funnel for the spirit
coming into me without losing a drop, my black
guardian angel come to rescue me before all the words

get out, I looked over Jordan and what did I see coming for
to carry me home. Regardez, it all comes back, even the first
grade French, when the tornado stirs up the past, bewitched spoon
lost in its own spin, like a roulette wheel that won't
be steered like the world. They drove me underground,
tornado watches and warnings, atomic bomb drills. Adult
storms so I had to leave the room. Truth is

the tornado is a perfect nappy curl, tightly wound,
spinning wildly when I try to tamper with its nature, shunning
the hot comb and pressing oil even though if absolutely straight
I'd have the longest hair in the world. Bouffant tornadic
crown taking the royal path on a trip to town, stroll down
Tornado Alley where it intersects Memory Lane. Smoky spirit-
clouds, shadows searching for what cast them.

~Thylias Moss