Diaspora
Eight bars for Greg Pardlo
Accepted to your master class while ignorant of what
besides a Pulitzer you were, I stopped to get your book,
and after being charmed by that first poem on being born,
was daunted by the density of learned allusion in your work;
so, locked out of the Promised Land of meaning for the sin
of being shallow, I started leafing forwards from the back,
trying, like the hotel thief who jiggles every doorknob,
to find just one unlocked, to burgle for its billfold sense,
the keys and coins left on the desk, the lacy bra inside
the dresser drawer, the belted pants across the chair,
the cell phone plugged and glowing on the bathroom sink;
and there, I found your poem about the Quaker Parrots
living in the ballfields wide and graveyards deep of Brooklyn,
and that began a recognition hometown comfort groove.
I recognized those parrots and my Brooklyn in the one
where you had walked. Your voice became a ticket to a reading
where Whitman, Moore and Auden, Hart and Lourde
were sipping wine and pocketing the pretzel snacks for later;
and the only thing that poems have ever done,
to make a way for someone I could tumble talk to native tongue
to tongue, came fresh as a baguette in a bicycle basket.
So, when I heard your call that I should raise my eyes to see
those parrots in the trees, I shouted like a congregation
that I have raised my eyes to a Midwood, Brooklyn sycamore
on the walk we’d take around my parents’ block to smoke some pot
before Thanksgiving dinner, and I have seen the stick nest
of the Quaker Parrots jutting like a beaver lodge
above the leaf-strewn lawn of the Orthodox Jews
who invaded our assimilated neighborhood
in the decades since we siblings moved to Jersey
and Connecticut, unaware that Kings would rise again.
And I have heard their noisy chattered ruckus, though to me
they sounded less like Dizz and Bird at Minton’s Playhouse
popping peanuts than like housewives calling deli orders out
to countermen in lab coats and smudged white paper side caps
on a Friday at Blue Ribbon while their cars were double parked
on Avenue J.
So, when my sister touched my sleeve to pass the roach to me,
I pointed, as first one and then another, green as Kool Aid
showed up at the dark mouth of the nest and pulsed their wings,
then flew away, and asked her are those parrots, or a figment of the weed?
And, when we got back to the house from our pre-Thanksgiving walk,
my Uncle Fred and Cindy’s boyfriend Robert watching Dallas
play the Giants in the kitchen, dipping crackers in the baked brie
before the guests arrived, I told my mother, peeling carrots for the crudité,
there were parrots in the tree outside the Berson’s house, and she said,
Arthur, darling, Berson moved out years ago; the yahmmies live there now.
So, I was riffing on diaspora, on everything that smacked at me,
even on your epigraph, which said that love is as a hundred thousand,
which put me distantly in mind of Lear, whose heart
would break into a hundred thousand flaws or ere he’d weep
for loss of child’s fealty as a kingdom he was banished from,
but only as a quote that you might know,
and not because it really fit, since sometimes,
when you solo, you wind up into a cul-de-sac and lose a measure backing out.
Those winter, still-dark mornings leading to your master class
I labored by the yellow lamp beside my desk, to trade these eights with you,
to raise the sort of ruckus that a Pardlo parrot might,
to lay my song on top of yours, to see your parrot avatars of love
to answer back with something from my nesting past
that sang a siphoned song, then finish with a bit about the cognoscenti
who nowadays give Quaker-Parrot tours to day-trip hipsters,
who are made to sign agreements to keep nesting sites a secret,
lest the poachers catch and turn the parrots into pets, the very pets
they were meant to be when they were shipped from Argentina,
as the legend goes, some sixty years ago, and their crate broke open
on the tarmac at Idlewild, whence they came like all of us, to Brooklyn.
—Submitted on 03/05/2022
Arthur Russell won Brooklyn Poet’s Poem of the Year for 2015 and was runner up for the same award in 2021. He placed second in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in 2021. He is co-editor of The Red Wheelbarrow, an annual journal published in William Carlos Williams’s hometown of Rutherford, NJ.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
