Grandmother's Tattoo

Maggie stares at the tattoo on her ankle

the same moment

a boy with a baseball cap

hoists her on his skateboard.

Her breasts are buttoned to his back.
               Who is he?

Together they speed past car door handles.

A stop at a traffic signal turns purple.

She looks down.

The tattoo--

                Where is it?

       Gone    and so is he.

Before coming to occupy 
the bone of her ankle,
the tattoo first appeared on her grandmother,

a woman who kept truth near,

until the tattoo peeled loose from her foot

with the crazy-glue of family history.

Theft.

She wants an officer to file a report.

Get someone to draw a character sketch.

Post the picture with the tattoo on the Internet.

Instead, an off-duty cop slides a board beneath her feet,
confiscated from some young punk, 
points out its gold rimmed wheels and rhinestone studs.

He told her to handle the board 
like a certificate of completion and to go forth.

Before she could say Harry Potter,
she'd zoomed past several fire hydrants.

The board had its own life and she was gaining balance,
everything coming quickly.

   Tomorrow is today.
         Bunk.

        Office of the Alternate Defender.
            As long as you have dinero.    

              Isle of Silk.
                 Baklava.

All the time she was growing up,
her mother had sunk the tattoo 
at the bottom of a couscous jar. 

Mom didn't know how to wear the tattoo,

and now Maggie, its legitimate heir,
had become victim of some freaky tattoo marauder 

who'd galloped away in the night like a bridegroom
kidnapper without an amber alert.

Discovering Jay-Z

 Decoded is a book about music that’s a work of art. 

The inside cover describes it as “A collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time.”

The artist in question is Shawn Corey Carter, better know by his stage name Jay-Z, hip-hop artist and entrepreneur par excellence. By the time this reader turned the last page, there was a desire to pile up more nouns like philosopher, political scientist, spiritual seeker, communicator, and poet-in-universal residence.

Everything about Decoded is filled with intentionality. This includes its cover, layout, notes, and graphic art.  The front jacket image, Rorschach, is by legendary pop artist, Andy Warhol, and the back cover by Jonathan Mannion who took pictures for Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt album, and who since then has made a career of photographing hip-hop artists.

Reading Decoded is a textural experience that alternates between Jay-Z’s lyrics appended with footnotes that are filled with explanations about poetic decision-making, to photographs and illustrations of people who are key to the overall story. Add illustrations, disc covers, and a typography that contributes to an overall rap feeling, borrowing from different places and art forms and piling them on in one place to a strong beat.

Like many of my generation (boomer), race (white), and gender (female), I have assiduously avoided rap for its misogyny, violence of language, and use of the n-word. As a friend of mine once asked, “Would you want your own child to listen to that language?” But the reality is that young people everywhere listen to rap. It is the music and poetry of what is now an international generation, which is why this book is important; it goes directly to rap’s emotional roots.

The opening pages of Decoded serve up a view of the Marcy Houses projects in Brookyn’s Bed-Sty area with pathways connecting twenty-seven six-story buildings.  In this labyrinth of tunnels and benches, Jay-Z describes how the rapper and the hustler blend together and how the beat is everywhere.

“It’s been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it’s built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it’s the beat.”

Reading Decoded, I understood how some rap, called by Chuck D, “the CNN of the ghetto,” could be understood as work songs. By that I mean stories of making a living through hustling, selling crack and walking the tightrope of police and dealers and drive-by shootings without.

Jay-Z writes, “This is why the hustler’s story—through hip-hop—has connected with a global audience. The deeper we get into those sidewalk cracks and into the mind of the young hustler trying to find his fortune there, the closer we get to the ultimate human story, the story of struggle, which is what defines us all.”

Through Jay-Z’s songs, we follow his metamorphosis from street hustler to rap artist who wants to win at the game. And not only do we get to read his story. The book provides us with a snapshot history of rap in the eighties and nineties. Reading these lyrics is to see how rhymes flow and connect and change. It’s an appreciation of rap’s artistry. Jay-Z’s footnotes, which explain specific references and street lingo, also illustrate his awareness as a poet who layers meanings with deliberate word choices, using line breaks, repetition, and references to cultural icons, and relating stories embedded within other stories that reverberate inside the beat.  

In “This Can’t Be Life” with Beanie Sigel and Scarface on the Dynasty album, Jay-Z explains how Scarface received a call in the recording studio telling him that a friend had just lost one of his kids in a fire. But art is survival.  Scarface continued the recording session and the end of the song reads like this:

“Lovin your kids just like you was ours / And I’m hurtin for you dog; but ain’t nobody pain is like yours / I just know that heaven’ll open these doors / and Ain’t no bright side to losin life; but you can view it like this / God’s got open hands homey, he in the midst of good company / Who loves all and hates not one / And one day you gon’ be wit your son…”

The Epilogue is unexpected. Jay-Z recounts his meeting with Oprah Winfrey who had voiced her skepticism in the past about hip-hop “particularly the use of what she’d call the ‘n-word.’”

While Jay-Z muses upon the fact that Oprah has championed Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison who also use violent and raw images,  he writes ,“To her, it’s a matter of acknowledging the deep and painful history of the word. To me, it’s just a word, a word whose power is owned by the user and his or her intention…The key is to change the person. And we change people through conversation, not through censorship.”

Decoded is also available in a downloadable version., complete with videos and interviews.

Jay-Z, you’ve made a new convert.

Decoded by Jay-Z, Spielgel & Grau (a division of Random House), New York, 2010,  308 pgs, $35.00

The Widow Discovers the Secret of Leona Canyon

Before dog-walkers with squadrons of panting beasts
pull up in SUVs, I arrive early--a woman without a pooch
who can be trusted to make a game of counting packets of shit

set aside for some doggie walker's return trip.
I start early, knot a hoodie around my waist,
hiking in the sun I want to lose myself,

balance on a branch of a buckeye tree
with its candelabra of mock lilacs,
walk past hemlock that lace the trail,

everything is a blaze of white
as spring marries summer and loosens her veil.
I dip my hands in water and wash my face.

Anna's hummingbird, with her red crown
and red spotted throat, sips right along with me.
Shepherds follow their off-leash flock up the canyon.

The Widow Rapsodic

The beat is everywhere, but life has to find its own flow.
Jay-Z

Take out your purse and lip gloss this--
Woodpeckers are eating my roof
I'm so nervous--
like a rookie cop on a new beat.

Day after day, I hear them hammering--
a chorus line with 100 pairs of feet--
Friends say I should join AARP.
What for? To get a discounted rental?

I dial insurance for the interview--
Each time I look out the window--
another shingle bites the dust.
My life's savings are going bust.

The agent on the line whines
there's nothing he can do to stop her--
assumes the bird's a she and not a devil--
But do I look like some Harry Potter?

Like this is a video conference
and you could really tell.
The bank refi is not going well.
Rain washes out my eyes

with a new vacancy rate--
I watch my furniture float away--
drive by a fork in the road
and decide to go straight.

Blue, Green, and Red

Freeze-dried memories
dissolve in the waves
along Highway One
and turn blue, green, and red.

Blue for the times
I ran my finger
on the sharp edge of love
and stayed quiet,

green for the passion
that blooms in Lorca
and grows in the city
between pavement blocks,


and red, red that burns hot
like a soldering iron
that pits soft skin raw
to join sandstone with hurt.

The Widow Revisits Golfball Graveyard in Dimond Park

Afternoons we stayed in Dimond Park
and mornings, too, when young bodies
sang with new notes inside a pendulum
swinging up and down.

The children climbed monkey bars
and screamed on the slide in the sandbox
where every kind of dog buried its shit
and walked away pleased

until it was time to hike the canyon
filled with mudrocks and ferns.
Green parasols shaded wet feet
as we heaped mouths with blackberries,

and wove fingers between hairy thorns.
In summertime, it was quiet and cool.
Bay laurel trees arched above our heads,
a processional to the graveyard

where golf balls
from the driving range at Trestle Glen
lay buried at the edge of the stream
like giant roe waiting to be fertilized,

some orange, many white, a few
had already shed their outer peel.
They were not our keepers.
Something else had found them.

The game was about how many balls
children could stuff inside their pockets
without rolling back down.
Not the kids. The balls

swelled our pockets, lumps
which were less like grapes
and more like lymph nodes
nursed by loving hands.

And now as I look up the canyon,
past the tangled blackberries
and water spilling over rocks
with pyramids of dog shit

edging the path in mold, all I have left
are hard bits of memory
that line my own pocket.
I touch them over and over again.

Landays by Afghan Women & Poet Sayd Bahodine Majrouh

I discovered the poet Sayd Bahodine Majrouh on a flight from Oakland to New York. Prepared for the six-hour trip to visit my family, I had brought along a number of magazines from my dining room table. The stack included a National Geographic magazine with an article about Afghani women. The article included several amazing landays that I learned had been translated by Majrouh that identified him as the preeminent Afghani poet of the twentieth century. The article went on to note that he had been assassinated during his exile in Pehawar, Pakistan on February 11, 1988.

What had caught my attention and led me to Majrouh were the landays, a form that I later learned means “the short one.” It is a poem consisting of two verse lines of nine and thirteen syllables. These poems are largely anonymous and meant to be sung. Majrouh had collected these verses among Pashtun women in the valleys of Afghanistan and the refugee camps of Pakistan. They were first translated into French.  Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry published by Other Press, offers these landays in English translation.

The books’ Introduction discusses the landay and explains, “In a strict sense, they exist off-screen—off the cultural screen that is reserved exclusively for men and, consequently, off the social screen.”

Here are several examples:

My lover wants to keep my tongue inside his mouth,

Not for the delight of it, but only to establish his steady

     rights on me.

Oh rooster, wait a little with your song!

I have just come into my lover’s arms.

Gently slide your hand inside my sleeves,

The pomegranates of Kandahar have blossomed and

     they are ripe.

My friend, which of these two to choose?

Mourning and exile arrived at my door together.

Tears are streaming down my face.

I cannot forget Kabul’s snow-topped mountains.

Your love is water and it is fire,

Flames are consuming me, waves are swallowing me up.

The outlaws stripped everyone down to the bone.

I was plundered beneath my lover’s chest.

Young mean, defend me, defend your very honor!

My father is a tyrant who throws me in an old man’s bed.

See the dreadful tyranny of husbands:

He beats me and then forbids my weeping.

Bracelets on my arms, jewelry around my neck,

I’m leaving with my beloved, we are going home.

Majrouh collected these voices., a poet walked the way of the Sufi and the philosophers, a man who fought for the independence of Afghanistan and for a future that would respect individual liberty.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978, Majrouh went into exile in Peshawar where he founded the Afghan Information Center, which broadcast reports on and analyses of the resistance across the world. He is regarded as the literary heir of Rumi and Omar Khayyam. Majrouh’s three-volume epic, Ego-Monstre, sadly, is not available in English.