Refuge Temple

254 Purdy Street, Buffalo, NY, childhood home of Lucille Clifton

There will be another storm always on the air

Or in the air or are you the air

Cold unrecognizable following

The inside road

This vessel bears one through

Snow or time to find the house

Paint peeling and maybe unfamiliar but the address

Is to a place that doesn’t exist anymore

An empty lot

Now owned by the woman

Next door who leases it to a

Storefront church that needs the space for parking

I take a selfie with the snowbank

254 Purdy Street

Sunday morning they will plow and cars will fill the place

Worshippers filing next door

Names of the family who lived here forgotten

Sayles their name was Sayles

Well there’s Miss Bowden says the neighbor

Who lives over there

Ninety years old

Lived here her whole life

If anyone’d remember she would

Though if the house don’t hold against the world

And the body don’t hold against the world

Snow falling down

What can hold

The church house the neighbor next door

The snow Old Miss Bowden

This empty lot

We empty now

Everybody drive home

Song done over

Snow river hover

House is gone

Stormsent era

That Miss Bowden may remember

The twelve-fingered girl who lived here

We tell the neighbor: her name was Lucille

Playing in the street

Afraid of the dark

Bringing the light

 

East Side, Cleveland, OH, apartment building of Julie Patton

In the house of Julie Patton

Bumblebees do sing pollen

In the cave of ears

Every thing listens

Jimi, Barack, and Marilyn Buck

The saints of the place

In vigil of excellent beings

Light poles hold typical beasts

Though here they empty themselves

Into me

Orange spaces do make

A world again for though the gods are mythic

The goddesses spin

Dear Julie sing

Me through the long hallway

The dark one sleeved in your mother’s

States of mind

State of mine is the one that opens my body

In heat through dark and salted moments

Body is a book

House does quiver

Unwritten the way of how to find you

House is the book

In the language of feathers that launch

Whose heart could race

Winter air winter season that rushes

How we in dark are slung

The dark that opens its hallways

Time mastered by Shiva and Hanuman

I did stand in the empty space

Filled by snow

Then here in the sun-flirted front room

Watched by Saint Nina Simone and Saint Joan Baez and Saint 
Buffy Sainte-Marie

I wonder forward in Sapphic tongue

Who is remember me

Who is open me with their tongue

Who languages the space of a house that don’t exist

Better thought sun see Julie sing sanctified

Sing swung sing one and one and one and one

 

Barrington, Rhode Island, right near the Bay, home of C.D. Wright 
and Forrest Gander

When she gives me directions and describes it to me

I expect a red-room schoolhouse

Driving across the water from Providence

Into the stream-laced far shore

Far shore where a boat unlands

To determine the shape of what isn’t

There I drive past wrong streets

Wrong houses places whose bells I ring

Stranger in the forest and dark-skinned too

Where do I belong

From the bathhouse I came

Where I worshiped at all manner of strange altars

Does this make me more or less human

Tongue makes you human

And how it translates the body into language

To find the door as it was described to me

Frosted glass and Japanese characters lining it

School saying the language of the sun

No sums add up here

But she calls me in

And I frown to know long to know

What holds the house against the world

How will words survive the dissolution of the body

Of the planet’s core

Sore and soar it came down through the cloud cover

Gray-white curtains

House of a dozen languages

At the cold lake the far away lake

She grabbed me post-lecture where I told about how

I could not translate the words of the poet until I came to her own sun-loved city

She begged me to always love all manner of strangers

I thought she meant the regions of the body

I’d have promised her anything though years later in Rhode Island

Named for an island no one can find

Lover I love you forever

House that disappeared

Books that live in the air

Island that no one knows

While on Purdy Street good people park their cars in the snow

Go inside and sing

We don’t have nothing more than this anymore

No planet no lover no words no nothing no more