Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, RUSH HOUR, by BRUCE A. JACOBS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

RUSH HOUR, by                    
First Line: My honda drops
Subject(s): Automobiles; Escapes; Family Life; Racism; Cars; Fugitives; Relatives; Racial Prejudice; Bigotry


My Honda drops
steeply as severed sleep
off the gummy lip
of the highway,
swims like a sidewinder
up the stone-dust cut bank
of the hill toward my
house, a cinder block
trapezoid just a shade
less gray than the color of
tonight's world.

The car door closes
behind me, an exit
from time, it being
a hundred thirty years
since my next-door neighbors
gave up their slaves. I am
a black man
stepping from a
black car
onto loose footing that feels
familiar as darkness
here, where farmers grow
sweet white corn
and I pay good rent
for my peace and quiet

-- although tonight
the cicadas are out
like God's power saw,
some great unoiled ratchet,
their on-and-off friction
jaggedly endless,
a wheel of steel fists
making a hammer of
even each instant's
pocket of silence.

I moved here for this:
a quiet as trenchant
as the thick wall of fluid
around my brain
that afternoon years ago
when, at age 10,
I knelt on the sidewalk
of my father's drug store
and clung to my task
of picking up litter
while three black boys
kicked me in the head,
drove their pointed shoes
into my skull
again and again,
like slow-motion jackhammers
or bullets on springs.

I heard nothing, only
the dull ring of space travel
while they swung away,
struck at my brain
with their calls of
Pussy, Rich Boy, White-Assed
Punk, their boots pounding
upside the head of
a kid on his knees
who had never fought
for a thing that he owned.
I held onto the pavement
with my fingernails.
Like a bettle who could
scale concrete or walk out
from beneath a car's tire,
I waited them out,
watched their thin legs
recede. Then I rose
with the trash.

I moved here for this:
a quiet as inviolable
as wet cotton, like
the airless childhood minutes
I waited, buried beneath sheets
after hearing my father's car
pant into the driveway.
Every night, I rehearsed
the smooth motion: my hand
gliding beneath the bed
for the baseball bat,
feeling how I would
dive like a hawk
if he were to loom over my mother
with just one more threat
about the men he imagined
she traded for his women.

I could almost see it:
how he would hunt me,
scouting the opposition,
how the white light would burn
his shape into my doorway,
how I would square up,
greet his tall glare
with one whistling arc
of my Louisville Slugger,
send his skull
rattling into the bleachers.
I took to going to bed
early, as bait, a decoy,
like my favorite bass plug,
jointed, wounded, barbed.

I moved here for this:
a quiet as clear as the
hard gaps between blares
of pickup-truck horns
toward my windows at night,
a quiet as sharp as the chink
of lofted beer bottles
against the brittle fence rails
of this collapsing horse farm,
a quiet as full-mouthed
as a black boy
eating mashed potatoes
in junior high school
the day a black upperclassman
crook-walked to the table
I shared with white friends,
demanded, with irony,
if I was a Soul Brother,
let me stutter, "No," then
pulled snot from his own nose,
smeared it on my plate,
told me softly, "Eat it"
before easing away.

I moved here for this:
Air quiet and thick
as a man's longest swallow.
A thirty-year commute
to five unmowed acres
of every sound the night
might pull from my throat
if I were able
to speak.

Copyright © Bruce A. Jacobs.






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