An Elegy for Pharoah Sanders

Fear not Man 

By degrees, I am submitting to God. Before I am tackled and talked about, before the fowlers lure me with the cheap jewel of reed blood, before Gregory, before Legba, before the loa know me disobedient and impersonating. Amiri, longing to be a preacher, and Malcolm, longing to let his ears touch the horned air of those men who broke open the sound barrier into portals that would swallow them whole. Why then, am I weeping for Pharoah, who survived the chasm of himself for eighty alive years and all of the spirit ones to come. The deaths are getting thinner by degrees, chased out of the heavens so that the bodies, as they rot, are sent back too early, spiraling back down with demon bitterness and less music of the spheres to cast it as delirium. I estimate he’ll plant a seed in me and I’ll be asked again and again to bring a soul forth. And month after month, I’ll toss them overboard a ship I’m riding, my ships, faces shivering just beneath me in the water just beneath me—fleeting, fleeing archipelago bloat and roam of this thinned-out approach to dying. This child, with a scripture engraved in his palm as his god bans the graven image and he goes in sevens and unlearns his name which was etched there, engraved, and banned. So that a grave is not the site that portends a resting soul, it suggests one who has been banished or cornered into vagueness and undelivered. Here come some dragons, some riders. Laying eyes on the land they remember lifetimes spent looking away and go land blind. That’s flying. That’s Pharoah’s tone. Grounded and drowsier through the years, because we are told to perform diminishment to earn our place in eternity. A lie we learn to perform which turns us against eternity. But if you caught the swooping alertness in him just once, in those late years, you’d submit to God with me, give up your calm and stoical repression of suffering and fall on your knees as he blows love up into the weatherless territory of worship. The image was banned because we confused it with the sound’s beauty and danced with ourselves in the river-mirror while drowning— then in reverse. Came back angry at ourselves while landing on the flood as its incentives to recur, to punish, to deliver us. Here I come with my ships and my submission, pedigreed in song/obsession with what cannot be said, with what you are forbidden to say, with what you must say anyways

to his picture                               

                                     on fire   and thin with leaving