By
IDRISSA
SIMMONDS
Ghost Walking a Jamaican Woman Home
The century is only 30 years into its pivot
& a Kingston night is wild, still sprouting.
This is when washerwomen hurry home on flattened feet.
Here. See this one now in the street’s dark river.
See the straightened gingerroot back,
the shoulders: two clenched fists about her ears.
She is thinking of 3 sons & 1 girl.
She is thinking of sex, understands the hungry hard bead,
ever-growing in a cellar within her
is absence of sweating flesh, grip
of palms, brusque or gentle, on her bare & waiting waist —
She feel this want in her mouthful of teeth.
I am behind her, in front, in, smelling
her eye whites, slipping my duppy fingers along
the ridge of each callous. Remembering.
She is thinking of Pa Dee. The brick black
of a man she call husband. His ashy
preacher mouth and hard-won hands still gripping her love.
All these cupped things are fleeting;
the man the pickneys the house
the marching of her legs to the home she has earned.
What is ever-present is the rawness of palms steeped
in cold water & lye soap; the knotted soldiers
up a black woman’s trench of a spine.
This is what you must bathe & turn
This is what you will get to take with you
on your return to dirt and cicadas.
16
Behind you, in front, in.
I will be your ride home,
the doppelganger you did not know you missed.
BRN-FALL-2012.indb 16
9/7/12 11:26 PM