Jimmy's Blues Read Online Free Page A

eyes.

Mirrors
    (for David)
1
    Although you know
    what’s best for me,
    I cannot act on what you see.
    I wish I could:
    I really would,
    and joyfully,
    act out my salvation
    with your imagination.
2
    Although I may not see your heart,
    or fearful well-springs of your art,
    I know enough to stare
    down danger, anywhere.
    I know enough to tell
    you to go to hell
    and when I think you’re wrong
    I will not go along.
    I have a right to tremble
    when you begin to crumble.
    Your life is my life, too,
    and nothing you can do
    will make you something other
    than my mule-headed brother.

A Lover’s Question
    My country,
    t’is of thee
    I sing.
    You, enemy of all tribes,
    known, unknown, past,
    present, or,
    perhaps, above all,
    to come:
    I sing:
    my dear,
    my darling,
    jewel
    ( Columbia, the gem of
    the ocean!)
    or, as I, a street nigger,
    would put it—:
    (Okay. I’m your nigger
    baby, till I get bigger!)
    You are my heart.
    Why
    have you allowed yourself
    to become so grinly wicked?
    I
    do not ask you why
    you have spurned,
    despised my love
    as something beneath you.
    We all have our ways and
    days
    but my love has been as constant
    as the rays
    coming from the earth
    or the sun,
    which you have used to obliterate
    me,
    and, now, according to your purpose,
    all mankind,
    from the nigger, to you,
    and to your children’s children.
    I have endured your fire
    and your whip,
    your rope,
    and the panic from your hip,
    in many ways, false lover,
    yet, my love:
    you do not know
    how desperately I hoped
    that you would grow
    not so much to love me
    as to know
    that what you do to me
    you do to you.
    No man can have a harlot
    for a lover
    nor stay in bed forever
    with a lie.
    He must rise up
    and face the morning sky
    and himself, in the mirror
    of his lover’s eye.
    You do not love me.
    I see that.
    You do not see me:
    I am your black cat.
    You forget
    that I remember an Egypt
    where I was worshipped
    where I was loved.
    No one has ever worshipped you,
    nor ever can: you think that love
    is a territorial matter,
    and racial.
    oh, yes,
    where I was worshipped
    and you were hurling stones,
    stones which you have hurled at me,
    to kill me,
    and, now,
    you hurl at the earth,
    our mother,
    the toys which slaughtered
    Cain’s brother.
    What panic makes you
    want to die?
    How can you fail to look
    into your lover’s eye?
    Your black dancer
    holds the answer:
    your only hope
    beyond the rope.
    Of rope you fashioned,
    usefully,
    enough hangs from
    your hanging tree
    to carry you
    where you sent me.
    And, then, false lover,
    you will know
    what love has managed
    here below.

Inventory/On Being 52
    My progress report
    concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
    is discouraging.
    I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
    Furthermore, it appears
    that I packed the wrong things.
    I thought I packed what was necessary,
    or what little I had:
    but there is always something one overlooks,
    something one was not told,
    or did not hear.
    Furthermore,
    some time ago,
    I seem to have made an error in judgment,
    turned this way, instead of that,
    and, now, I cannot radio my position.
    (I am not sure that my radio is working.
    No voice has answered me for a long time now.)
    How long?
    I do not know.
    It may have been
    that day, in Norman’s Gardens,
    up-town, somewhere,
    when I did not hear
    someone trying to say: I love you.
    I packed for the journey in great haste.
    I have never had any time to spare.
    I left behind me
    all that I could not carry.
    I seem to remember, now,
    a green bauble, a worthless stone,
    slimy with the rain.
    My mother said that I should take it with me,
    but I left it behind.
    (The world is full of green stones, I said.)
    Funny
    that I should think of it now.
    I never saw another one like it—:
    now, that I think of it.
    There was a red piece of altar-cloth,
    which had belonged to my father,
    but I was much too old for it,
    and I left it behind.
    There was a little brown ball,
    belonging to a neighbor’s little boy.
    I