Chris Abani, Nigeria
Por: Chris Abani
1971
Daphne’s diary spun a wish too precious to speak.
I want a man who smiles when he talks about me.
Smiles because he knows all of me and loves all of me
and does not want me to change any of me.
I want a man like that.
A man whose voice is the pressure on my hips
when he calls my name.
Whose shallow breathing traces the arousal of my nipples
as I cook him dinner.
Whose laugh dips between my legs,
catching me by surprise and rocking.
Whose hands are rough when he touches my face honestly.
Whose embrace is desperate as though
I were the only thing keeping him from drowning.
Whose lips are moist with desire when he kisses me
and whose eyes dance with a dangerous fire.
I want, I want, I want a man like that.
A Small Prayer
I know nothing of truth
Towering like that first light,
unbending sacred river.
But my heart is unending,
circling in a rosary that falls heavy. Fruit
from piety’s tired hand
And there is the rumor – This is love, this is love
But what do I know of its lonely stations,
the full heft of a cross, the tenderness of rivets
But there is redemption in this enterprise –
Truth as memory’s best guess.
So I rummage with grubby hands, fashioning in stiff
Cardboard and paste, her yesterdays,–
Claiming something caught in the shadows
between couplets overflowing with promise
Inventing me, this child, this boy, this man
and my heart knows the stars I see,
knows others have traveled this dark path before; to poetry.
Dog Woman
It’s like flying in your dreams, she said. You empty yourself out and just lift off. Soar. It’s like that.
*
Red. Red. Just that word. Sometimes.
*
Yang & Yin. Like twins tumbling through summer. He, the rooster crowing sun; desperate – afraid –
as only men can be.
And Yin? Let’s say she has long hair – No, that won’t work. If we are to believe
the ancient Chinese, she was a dog howling moon.
*
When I counted out the pills, it was a slowing down. Like the delay between when the car goes through
the dip and your stomach falls away – And won’t stop.
*
Of course it was because she didn’t fit my mold. So I punished her. And why? And why? And why?
You did it, I said. You did it. Wouldn’t fill my world.
*
And eventually we all kill our mothers. Their eyes a tenderness that doesn’t flinch
from it. Knowing. Eventually. *
What else is there? *
Red.
54
Paula’s paintings are real. The women thick, visceral, rude, like stubborn cliffs the sea cannot contain – or drown.
*
Or dogs. And such as these drove Homer to despair – And his cry: Oh to see! To see! To see!
*
So Paula says: To be a dog woman is bestial is good. Eating, snarling.
Utterly believable.
Gross.
*
Like when Cesaria Evora breaks your heart with a smile all melancholy and sea and salt.
Assim ‘m ta pidi mar Pa ‘l leva ‘me pa ‘me ca voeta
And it doesn’t matter that you don’t know what the words mean. Some things are beyond that.
*
So. Tanya bought the record because Cesaria’s face is beautiful with all the lost love of the world
and darker than the blue of the sun setting over the Atlantic. *
It’s in the angle of light washing her hair with sun into a puddle that catches in the throat
The wood deck creaks from the weight of all that air and sun and silence Water chuckling in the tiny fountain in the corner holding up the song of wind chimes and flies
And it’s all here. Fire. Water. Stone. Wood. *
All caught up in Yeats and the cuckoo that wasn’t a real bird but cried
55
with all the agony of the desire for flight hemmed by wooden wings, and springs and cogs.
I think. *
Or looking for Rilke – How the panther is like the rage
of a doll’s soul caught in the body: but to say: under an open window, a violin
Accomplishment though is another matter – Just ask Baudelaire and so I
thought I could do it.
Necromancer, necromancer, necromancer make me a mate
only one of my ribs pray take. So why won’t women fit into that space?
*
Is that why in the photograph David plays an inflatable lyre? Does his smile make it all artifice?
* But life is this and it will not
be contained. The Igbo say: No one can outrun their shadow. And this is good. This is hope. Because, or maybe, we cannot outrun love.
*
To drive down a road, she said. Until it stops at the edge of the sea. An ocean vast and immense, she said. If you are lucky, she said. It fills you.
** Dog Woman is based on a series of paintings by Paula Rego called Dog Women.
The New Religion
The body is a nation I have not known.
The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping
from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that.
Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skincovered bone,
like a hand against the rough of bark. Like that.
“The body is a savage,” I said. For years I said that: the body is a savage.
As if this safety of the mind were virtue not cowardice.
For years I have snubbed the dark rub of it,
said, “I am better, Lord, I am better,”
but sometimes, in an unguarded moment of sun,
I remember the cowdung-‐scent of my childhood skin
thick with dirt and sweat and the screaming grass.
But this distance I keep is not divine,
for what was Christ if not God’s desire to smell his own armpit?
And when I see him, I know he will smile,
fingers glued to his nose, and say,
“Next time I will send you down as a dog
to taste this pure hunger.”
Chris Abani is novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright Chris Abani grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria. Abani earned a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria; an MA in English, Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London; and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of the poetry collections Sanctificum (2010), There Are No Names for Red (2010), Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems (2010), Hands Washing Water (2006), Dog Woman (2004), Daphne’s Lot (2003) and Kalakuta Republic (2001). His many books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), Song For Night (2007), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and Becoming Abigail (2006). Abani is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into many languages. He has also published essays in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Bomb, Witness, Parkett, and elsewhere.
Abani began writing at a very young age and published his first novel, Masters of the Board (1985), while still a teenager. The plot of the novel, a political thriller, proved uncomfortably close to actual events; it mirrored a coup that was carried out in Nigeria not long after, and Abani was incarcerated for six months on suspicion of having helped organize this attempted political overthrow. He continued to write after his release from jail, but was imprisoned again two years later, after the publication of his novel Sirocco (1987). The author was again released after a year of detention, but following another two years of writing, during which he composed several anti-government plays that were performed on the street near government offices, Abani was once again imprisoned and placed on death row. Able to escape after 18 months, thanks to the bribes his friends paid to prison officials, the writer immediately went into exile and settled in England for several years. Since 2001 the writer has been a resident of the United States.
Bio by Poetry Foundation.
