old red clay

We used to say about him hecame flying north, just like he wason wires, like some backwards gravity.

And once here he found he couldn’t go backsouth again becausea fear he had – of finding his black

mother’s body in the garage, eyestedious with indictment, damp dressrucked up on her big mushroom-skin thighs

and coquettish for a son’s caress,leaned like sleep against some late-model Buick, idled into emptiness:

That old rot-sweetness of tragedy, straightout of our puritan wet-dreams. No, we weren’t surprisedwhen it finally happened, but to him insteadand hanging in the place of gas: a tie

slung from a walk-in closet rodin some sterile air-conditioned real estateuptown, and his drunk undefeated grin, old redclay on his dragging Oxfords, and a god

too proud or gone to let them catch his weight.