Grandmother's Tattoo 3

Yoo-hoo! Girlie!
What's the big rush like you've got a date or something?

There's no one here to give you the right time of day,
and in case you're wondering,

I'm the voice of the graveyard,
alive, but not in your 1-2-3. Capice?

So much for introductions.
So much for this and that.

Let's get real and nail the coffin.
You're Maggie of the misfit foot.

Here's what to do:

Under the lidless eyeball of the sun,
keep riding until you find Section P. 

When you hear a kid
playing music from a garbage pile,

take his hand and he'll help you find your Granny.

That was it? Really?
To trust a voice echoing through leaves?

Somewhere a railroad car screeched to a halt.
Or maybe it was a dog barking.

Soft smell of cypress.
Maggie rolled the skateboard beneath her head.

A handbook of dreams wheeled her away:
      Snowberries attract birds and require little water.

At an airport security check:
      Everyone must remove all belts and empty pockets.

A host asked during a game show:
      What do most people want to see when they die?

There is a light above her head.
She never asked to be here,

alone as the tongue in her mouth.
      God.

Grandmother's Tattoo 2

Would she rather be at the shopping mall checking out clearance racks
than sailing on this red shoe of a skateboard moving her closer to the abyss,
not that Maggie knew what the abyss looked like.

Maybe a new department store where designer clothes 
were scattered higgledy-piggledy on tables, not even hangers.
The Abyss. 

Forget shopping. Right now in this moment,
the first order of business, 
to rescue her grandmother's tattoo
from the hands, calves, or chest of that buffoon

who had absolutely swept her off her feet,
only to abandon Maggie to an off-duty traffic cop
who hoarded skateboards.

Now she was inside her own video game,
her hands clammy with a thin coat of luck.

On her left, 
she saw a mountain as sharp as a swear word,

and sailed her carpet to its widow's peak,
looked down once again, saw the tabula rasa 

where in former times, her grandmother's tattoo
had encircled her ankle. Now robbed, bare, uncertain,

Maggie felt she was the last live link in a line of women, 
who had arrived here.

And where was here?

She heard an old woman's voice,
Your eyes are open like a cow on the hillside.

All she could see was a slope 
covered in a tureen of red autumnal leaves

marked by several hundred monuments
pimpled with rocks.

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.