Nathaniel Mackay

Nathaniel Mackey [Gloria Graham]

from Nathaniel Mackay’s Nod House:

Song of the Andoumboulou: 62 [excerpt]

It was the Ricochet Lounge

we ducked into, last call.

Sun Ra played a Toupouri

harvest. “They plan to leave,”

                                           we

semisaid, semisang, chimed in.

Hoarse arkestral flutes laid a

rug of water under our feet.

It was the end of the world

                                        again . . .

A warning song the semisong we

                                                  sang.

we all walked circles inside our

heads. Each of our heads an

aroused ark, a flat rock we

                                        rode,

we awoke aboard ship, a spinning

rock flying saucerlike, obduracy’s

day drawn out. Dread auspice’s day

a skipping rock we grew wet with,

                                                  pant

legs and hemlines wrinkling the face

of the bay, at obduracy’s behest we

walked on water . . . Stone ark we

stepped and stood on, miraculously

flat, spun with, could barely keep our

                                                       feet . . .

Obdurate sky the it we sense wrote

epitaphs on, we without world or

it without us, circling square less

than one, centrifugal, farther out

                                                the

longer we walked. Choked up

wearing epic shirts, moot ribbons,

ythm’s day begun . . . We were

he’s and we were she’s, each

one or the other, felt between our

                                                  legs

divining which. Home where there was

none, stone as close as we got,

talking the twos again . . . We were

I and 1, each 1 another; felt among

outselves fathoming which . . . One

                                                      was

dreaming again, lost to us dreaming,

                                                       dream-

ing us lost

again