Photos and text by Teju Cole
In Savannah, a homeless man, quite drunk, came out of the fog. “I am homeless,” he announced. He began to fulminate about the statues in front of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. They were of famous artists, but he took them to be conquistadors. “This one,” he said, pointing to Raphael, “was a mass murderer. And that one over there” — Phidias — “was a child abuser.”
I gave him money. He reached into his coat and handed me a flower.
Another poem from Teju Cole, in response to this.
Living in the body of a seal,
diffident as a crippled hound
stealing some shut-eye in the belly,
night office of the soul.
Enfolding not the future,
no gland of hope or glory,
the lobes will only testify
in favor of the shadowed now.
Solemn a temple of deception
as bird flight or other sign:
staves scattered across desert,
dowsing through text-terrain.
Wolf call hints at augury,
unfurls like lifting fog,
antenna pitched at gods who
are much too fond of sleeping.
© Teju Cole 2008
Another poem from Teju Cole, in response to this.
[audio:http://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/teju-cole-rightness.mp3]
For you shall be in league with the stones of the field
and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.
—Job 5:23
The hand emerges
from the pocket
on its own, its splodge
of low brown hills
a keloid map of how
I’d failed to heal.
Gnarled, tidal wind:
a leaf storm hassles the air.
Argumentative clouds.
This hand is strange to me.
I’d stretched it out
as makeshift landing gear,
like one reaching out
for help, or to bless,
and badged it instead
with dirt and blood,
red archipelago
from base of thumb to wrist.
The dog had stopped
and looked at me
with his mangy face,
and slowly turned away.
I left a part of myself there;
the road rehearsed itself in me.
“They can smell
your fear, you know.”
Yes, I’d thought of that.
This gift of theirs
was what I feared,
dull humanity unmoored
from the strangeness of a dog.
Cousin, I’ll go chasing trees,
wade ankle deep
in the soft coin they mint,
spend hours tailing memory,
a dog on scent,
a child in the creek
of full human being,
trampling prodigal bounty:
hand-sized leaves
—burlap, silk, damask—
weeping off the branch like sails,
blush-hued, wine-hued, gold:
healing scars that
protect the stones,
eyelids for their perfect eyes.
Let us agree to pray
for each other:
that the tidal wind
settle us into a rightness
and recreate from these faults
and fears, fitter selves,
as lean years follow fat.
© Teju Cole 2008
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.1MB)
Rock-Flipping Day 2008, from the Undiscovery Channel.
For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.
Job 5:23
Dear Teju,
Rocks are the roofs of a city
we barely know. On a dry ridgetop
at the end of a dry month,
I find little under them but burrows
leading deeper into the earth,
a colony of ants frantic
at the sudden inversion,
and on the talus slope, more rocks:
a puzzle that was put together wrong
8,000 years ago, but over the millenia
has settled into its own kind
of rightness. I follow a bear’s trail
through the woods, marked by black
cherry-pitted cairns of bear shit,
& note the series of overturned rocks,
flipped by an expert claw.
Only a human, uneasy at the way
our grotesque bodies no longer
quite fit into the matrix,
would ever return a flipped rock
to its bed. Birds have nests,
foxes have holes; culture
is not a thing unique to humans.
The song that makes the songbird
must be taught. Instinct borrows
always from improvisation —
the true two-step. But watch
a human child, too young
to hunger for our made world’s
humdrum El Dorados, playing
in the creek with a stick —
how she projects her dreams
into the teeming, pulsing flow,
how she punctuates
& fabricates — & tell me
this is not more wondrous
than any gold, this human
being!
Print
a letter from Teju Cole
[audio:http://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/teju-cole-shifting-load.mp3]
Nature: in the dream
it sounds like a thump,
a guest rapping
the floor boards from below.
Raccoon, groundhog,
milk snake in the walls,
the sound of summer
perfecting its two-step.
Country cousin,
I work a two-strand braid,
from outside in—
culture na yarn, na jolly
wey man dey take carry
burden for him head,
nature come dey help am
comot the load again.
The Soul Washer
protects another’s life.
Born the same week-day
as the Asante king,
he wears around his neck
a disc of solid gold—
the disc absorbs all evil
lofted at the king—
gold and man agree
to carry such a load.
Nature thumps again—
let me out or let me in,
the sound of summer
perfecting its two-step—
raccoon, groundhog,
milk snake in the walls.
© Teju Cole 2008
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.2MB)
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
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