Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
Letter To Be Wrapped Around a 12-Inch Disc
—To Major Jackson, from Gadsden, Alabama
Here it is, first disc I remember
pulling from the bin—jacket
white, label a dish of radio waves,
the way I wished
I could have seen the world, the sky
those nights when I pressed my ear
to the speakers and dialed the tuner
through Birmingham,
Jackson, New Orleans, reaching
for the sound of some beyond,
praying each night not only
not to die
but to wake up and discover
what I’d always known, myself
an alien with this second sight,
the world a book
of such vibration I could see
what I needed. And I needed
this, this music, whosever it was,
this elsewhere
I pulled from its sleeve and spun
beneath the needle, this orchestra
crash, this rush, this planet rocked
with lasers
like the blasts we hammered
out of high-tension wires,
a strange music at last
near at hand.
Each one was a rocket taking off
not landing, which is what
I prayed against each night
the shells flashed
on the army range a few hills distant
which we knew would be
among the first to go if
the Russians struck,
everything we knew turned first
to light and then to ash…
I can hear it now, lightning crack
in the Memphis channel,
hit me, in Bambaataa’s spin,
Bambaataa’s beat, the shock
of doors opening between the stars,
of someone reaching
down, George Clinton or Jesus
Christ, someone reaching up,
Sun Ra’s Rocket #9 taking off
for Venus,
anywhere but this before
the radiation, mutation
came down. I needed this,
this liberation
I’d spin each night and sometimes
cut the sound to listen
to the needle rattle in the groove,
a cicada in its shell,
waiting for wings to unfold,
four dollars of polyrhythm,
of syncopation
to begin to hear
myself over the drawl of home
and step to the mall-fountain
rap battles my friend coaxed me into,
teaching me
to fold a sentence
to a hawk, a panther,
a rattlesnake, a rocket,
an origami star,
Southside hicks against
boys from Litchfield
and Tuscaloosa Ave
I might see
in a parking lot
pulling their moms to the curb
then dialing up the beat
where we’d catch
each other’s bob, a by-word
we needed to call across
the lines the county offered us.
We had so much
behind us, the history
we were told we shouldn’t
name, stir up, remember,
so much silence
we needed to break. Alone
and then together and then
alone again, because they told us
we were young
and we should turn that noise down
we slid the discs off our fingers
until even the ridges of our prints
felt musical.
Dap is the vibe passing
hand to hand, hand to pen,
pen rolling like the needle
over the dark
then pulling back to spin
free again so
fingerprints give up
their songs,
and there in the dust
of having met, Birmingham
drifts with Philly, New York
with New Orleans.
Each note pops like lightning
in the broadcast air,
like Robert Johnson’s calloused
palps on the steel
as he learned his graveyard music
in a ghost town in Alabama
while looking up at the stars.
Take this then
and spin it, pulling history
back against itself until
you find the star-calling riff
and everything falls
and elsewhere gives way
to where and we don’t have to
look away again.
I fold the liner now,
my inked fingers leaving
their rings here where
you will have to peel the tape
to open the disc
of night to set it reeling,
in its grooves the plosive novas
of dust, the afterwards of skin
dropping
new beats between
the ones we already know.
If you like what the Rumpus is doing for National Poetry Month, you’ll probably like this multimedia anthology of original poems we’ve run at The Rumpus over the last three years. Available only for iPad. Check it out!
