Tuesday, July 18
CITIZEN
The only citizenship I have was given to me
by the Brooklyn trees. The trees-of-heaven, now ghost trees;
the trees of Canarsie: littleleaf lindens, silver maples, Norway
maples, and their little ship of seeds like ships on the Atlantic.
Or their paired tinted samaras which have wings and
thus love to spiral and flutter down to the soil in the gardens
where I sometimes sit and try to listen
to the labor of aquifers underground, the groan of seeds.
My sister who died and is now underground must be one of those seeds.
The white seeds, milky and deciduous, grow up to feed
Carolina wrens, buteo hawks and laughing gulls, these birds
of Brooklyn are my companions when I sleep and dream
that I’m singing in my sister’s voice,
or that I’m a bird-of-paradise, high and mauve above a mountain,
gliding over a blue marina, and in that dream I have on my head a crown
of fuchsia, and on my feet the bronze
hooves of white horses, the animals of grief.
Once, in the slice of the dark, returning
from the day’s labor, with rose apples in my knapsack, and suddenly remembering
something funny my sister had once said, I laughed
in the dark and blessed myself. Then flush with images of how we
used to climb trees together as children, and knowing that I’m invisible
in this city of gilded harbors, I thought,
though I did not do it, I thought I might climb the bark and silk of this maple tree
and jostle with black ants and vine dust, and go higher and higher,
as in my childhood until I reached the dome of the tree.
And from that high up, look toward the ports and islands and tidal estuaries
of the city and see them as silver constellations held together by a finger of darkness;
or toward the leafy cloud of the botanical garden
where goldenrods, asters and canna lilies sleep in midnight sap
and await resurrection by light. Perhaps, my sister is only asleep.
Or toward the bay of the Hudson, near the Little Red Lighthouse,
where the Atlantic hides in the river and meets the shore, and see my ancestors
rise as mist from the ocean.
I thought I might look from my tree and see the mossy acres
of Hart Island, that burial ground of strangers and citizens,
where all those we’ve lost are under the white dwarf stars of headstones.
The spectral multitude. As if while we slept, the graves began to spread
from plot to plot, multiplying all over the face of the earth.
It is not true that I praise the dead. I merely ask them to teach me their song.
(Gbenga Adesina)