What Milkman Leaps For

after Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

The sugar wings of a myth, a guiltless grandfather, a man with no
dark side, a gelatinous memory that feels pretty good, three hundred
dollar shoes feel right, alright. Like wings look good on in the mirror, handmade
so you could star in a play with ’em. Or host a garden party in ’em. So you could
dim the lights and burn myrrh, tank it to the hallways where guests linger
perusing installations of you in your wings. Where you could fly off
but all flights up and leave someone. All the rebels who
choose flock over children at home. The warrior who thinks a good fight
and whose family sits home practicing the epitaph. Back at Pilate’s, she
scratches out hair and her good looks. The bed ridden turns to cough
in the absence of a hero. Her gold miner, her reborn takes to air

to transcend the what, the dark marks on the wall. Awakened, it ain’t
as easy as it lifts. It can take up the outside, let alone it has to be
a man at all. Let’s skip that part, and say it can walk
over heavy shoes, over bear-eaten bodies. Be the one
to fly the flight homeward, with myths thick enough to drag river, to turn
up bodies, to unrest the dead with their socks on, who still reek of corn
whiskey, who still smell of many masters’ breath. And better yet, who still fingerprint
gunpowder, or worse, who still like little girls. Oh, what Milkman steps off into. The air
full of no one you can’t consistently count on. (Let’s try again) whose fault it all is. He
mean:
no one who show up for nothing you aren’t celebrating. No one who bounce you on
birthday knees
or who bounce birthday checks. No one not high enough to talk to when school is out, it’s
all
a myth with its skin lightened, with its orderly shoes. He no longer has to pinpoint
the balance; it has perched itself in the wreck of nesty hair clumped at bedside. He no
longer
has to be the unsettled, the conquested, the harvest. He takes to the air

to tribe in good grace, to stake the ground, to clan. He puts on wings and throws open the
doors
to faceless partygoers. He rounds up all the sexy people, calls them all
fam, drops brown liquor to their mouths and let’s not even
speak of rebellion. The heroes do their rounds. In troops
they brush. They take targets from a distance, just the four
or fifteen of them. Just the crew. The families back home, taking out
little bits of their skin. For this point, this nation. One less song so tomorrow
is the fight in a cave and milk walking out.