Gregory Pardlo   SHADES OF GREEN: ENVY AND ENMITY IN THE AMERICAN CULTURAL IMAGINARY Images of the stud and the buck have an amorously crafted resonance burnished by cultural anxieties, an addict’s logic toward the habit they place in the mind and the mysteries we lay at their feet. This course will begin by focusing on models represented in the 1994 Charles Russell film, The Mask, and Ang Lee’s 2003 The Hulk. The mojo and the genetic regression, the hyper-sexuality and the rage: these qualities are thrust and airbrushed onto the bacchic body of the Other, as we fantasize our repression of them in ourselves, the unquiet threat of psychosomatic greening; a silk garrote, an onanistic envy of the Other’s capacity for release; a monumental iconography of the hermetical black box of the brain. While we might be tempted to reduce these types to the pat dichotomies of comedy and tragedy, this course will examine the ways in which there is but one mask, a Janus-faced cleavage of thou art and thus am I, our goat-sung desires adrift in the wilderness, our tell-tale passions pulsing beneath the gladiolas in a mildewed hatbox (the act of masking triumphal and deadly), trembling the bulb on its stem. FOUR IMPROVISATIONS ON URSA CORREGIDORA after Gayl Jones My husband Mutt backhanded me down the fire escape out back a blues bar called Happy’s. Nothing holds a family together like irony and a grudge. Depends on what you call family. What’s left now of the generation I hadn’t known I made is just a scar squoze shut like a mouth that won’t eat, a score where doctors had to retrieve the fetus, its tub and my plumbing altogether. Now I’m soundproof, and now I’m forever hollow as a plaster statue. Just as I can’t go back to where my mothers cast me out to flatter their memories chiming, echoing, braiding the wind with their eccentric melody, Mutt can’t come back to me no more. I can picture him though harassing the shadows of my voice, drunk as a judge. My husband Mutt handled the hose that doused the fire, the reason I can’t make babies. I’ve claimed the blues is a current like electricity, but mine was a combustion engine cutting shapes out of noise. Lying at the bottom of those stairs I could already feel my machine slipping into pictures of still water. I began swallowing water- melon seeds by the handful hoping something take root: a vine, a silence. I was reborn at the crime scene; I survived the rent in time to look back on it squeezing shut like a fist. A refrain: echolalia: bad penny: menses. Evidence of a pattern we are determined to reveal when we find ourselves standing before the judge. Evidence of the devil we’re determined to reveal when we’re testifying for the jury and the judge. My husband Mutt stared back down the barrel of his years, came up loaded and hapless. I was determined to take him in spite of my history, to refrain from adding to the pattern emerging from the rueful chorus: my mothers cast me as amanuensis to record their versions of the crime. Once upon a time means once and for always and for wherever you are and now I’m singing blues in a bar revealing as much skin as you should be willing to reveal when you pouring your seed into the electric element. We are given two names: one to work like witness protection, and one to carry mechanically to the grave. I never took my husband’s name. I imagine that would be as useful as a newspaper covering my head in the rain. Useful as letting my eyes be the judge. My husband Mutt handed me back all the love he felt I had failed to give him. That’s saying something close to nothing. “Do nothing til you hear from me,” he said, and smiled. Whoever owns these blues is a matter of some debate. The story of my people unfolds each day like a newspaper detailing the catechism that connects me to history: Are you hurt? Yes, I am the hurt, the silent mouth is the barter. What’s a husband good for? Seed money. Generations working the fields. Why do we make dreams? A little ritual. A little lining for the purse. Each song is a number of the seven veils: each number is a revelation of skin measuring degrees of distance from the crime and from the guilt of the crime. Corregidora: as much kin as we’re willing to reveal lest we be judged.     CHAPEL AVENUE AFTER CLOSING Guitar strings gossamer the bandstand floor Amid cuticles of reeds. The upright Bass against the wall bloats its zippered bag. I pay the band and share a few more drinks Before upending the stools on the bar With the TV pouring carbonated Light to counterpoint marbled canopies Of air. In soapy water, shot-glasses Slip, toast and make a thunder in the sink. I have one more drink at the piano And recall how the cats got down tonight. But now the keys seem to have forgotten Themselves. Outside the door, morning mounts its Damp advance, swinging rust-bucket birdsongs. ALL GOD'S CHILLUN Late Sabbath morning and the laboring children of modest, leafy districts will let stall their mowers & whackers and set their trowels upon paving stones, float flags of bandanas across beaded brows and turn their chins toward the uprushing draft to kite their breath-taking bodies like milk pod seeds. While air brakes of semi’s on the off-ramps like power chords from some distant rock opera anthem the children’s lifting the children will gyre off Jersey lawns silhouettes thinning in the terrific noonday sun forming a jet stream across wetlands & the flame- scalloped Narrows. The children’s outsized shirts & pant waists we warn will not balloon their longing for shores behind the horizon or past the ozone patched with diminishing shadows of the last battalion channeled into deserted air shadows still crimpling like crepe de Chine against the industrial haze. We panic, can’t fit all their images onto post office walls. And whose flight are we talking here, anyway? Icarus or agony of the American slave? They refuse to signal the angle of our sympathies. Young America! they cry while we shake our heads picturing their bodies dropping like spoons & watches we admonish them their youth their bones their fall into oceans where they’ll glint and form a railway only the ancients will read perched on the detritus of commercial satellites, and on car hoods, and athletic gear, all the gods bottled in the machinery of our routine lives.   Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem (APR, 2007). He is recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Lotos Club Foundation, the Seaside Institute, and Cave Canem. He teaches at George Washington University. His website is http://pardlo.com.   Published in Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 2011.   To read more by this author: Gregory Pardlo: Langston Hughes Tribute Issue