Grandmother's Tattoo 6

She listens to his notes dapple the cottonwoods

with sadness and laughter that reaches

toward outstretched leaves.

When Mew finally raises his face from the chin rest,

he signals with his bow toward her.

She must play her part and find Section P.

She says good-bye and walks, the same way he told her,

alongside a rock wall covered with moss.

Her gold hoop earrings play hide-and-seek in her dark hair.

She doesn’t want to get lost.

What if she meets her grandmother?

Will she be angry at Maggie for losing the tattoo?

The stone wall keep winding around.  Stone steps go down.

There is a woman whose skin is the color of moonlight.

In shopping aisles of the dead, she says,

waving her fingers at a swarm of fruit flies,

some of us get marked up and some of us get marked down.

We all get buried in the same store.

Now that’s what I call a bargain!

Grandmother?

Maggie?

Her grandmother’s silver hair is stuck at the back of her neck with bees.

Life is a seasoning that tenderizes us,
breaks down our rough edges so we can bend. 
Come closer. Tell me how you’ve been.

Maggie traveled this far on her skateboard to get some place,

goes there now.

Maggie says her mom died several years ago.

Dad is gone for most of the time,

sits in a restaurant and drinks wine.

Worst of all, Maggie has lost grandma’s tattoo.

Does grandma fill up like a water balloon and burst?

Instead she explains how during the war,

she buried herself beneath a haystack and escaped,

tattooed numbers above her wrist.

Until the other day when a messenger boy

gave her the same tattoo. That’s when numbers joined each other like Siamese Twins and shared bloodlines.

Where each number began and the other stopped,

stuck together like teeth to candy.  

Grandma scooped something from the dirt,

fixed it above Maggie’s ankle.

No numbers in the red.

One world.

There on her ankle, a glowing orb.

No countries, boundaries.

My granddaughter, tell them.

Grandmother's Tattoo 5

Facing west, there are aisles through gravestones.

Everywhere, the same thing, cottonwoods blazing yellow. 

A peacock sweeps the ground with his tail.

Hi-ho, he says, and flutters his fanny.

Maggie thinks this is a 3-D animation

or maybe the Pasty Lump Lady with more tricks.

His reedy voice is like a clarinet's. 

Maggie misses her grandmother's tattoo,

the only remnant that remains of her family,

her one connection stolen by a boy

with eyes the color of melting honey.

Or does she miss the boy?

I'm lost, she explains,

gestures toward the broken skateboard,

and I’m on foot.

The peacock extracts a long feather from his tail.

My gift to a girl,

guaranteed to get you wherever you need to go.

He swishes his feathers and disappears into the yellow cottonwoods.

Maggie waves the feather and hopes for magic.

Nothing doing.

She wants to return to a delta of square one,

to pop-up from the middle like a seed from a plum.

But the Pasty Lump Lady has stolen her hunger.

Even so, there’s more to Maggie than pancakes.

At the intersection of Sections I and M,

vines cling to trees like long lost relatives.

In another part of the graveyard,

the sun burns a hole in an apron and busts out.

Maggie draws warmth around her like a cashmere sweater.
She accidentally drops the skateboard to the ground. A chase.

In Section C, she finds the skateboard.

There’s a boy playing a fiddle, his face as white as a ruffled shirt.

The fingerboard has a ketchup label,

the fiddle, Norwegian Codfish.

He says his name is Bartholomew, Mew for short,

sees the feather,

and tells her he used to play softball with the peacock.

And you?

Maggie of the Misfit Foot. She tells him everything.

He not so much.

I rescue music from garbage heaps. That’s all,

and begins to walk away.

She wants him to stay, offers the skateboard as a sacrifice.

And like a man about to buy a new car, he considers--

Solid wood. Gold rims. No financing. Sweet.

He plays the fiddle until his music fills the grove with sunlight.

Grandmother's Tattoo 4

Chewing on words like camp, railroad, gold teeth.

Little snot go wipe your nose
or Mr. Potato Head will plant a carrot between your toes.

She wakes up to a day that is half night,
morning throws off a purple bathrobe.

Birch trees point trunks
like arthritic fingers in different directions.

Hungry. She combs her hair with two fingers,
jumps on the skateboard to hunt for breakfast.

Mountains breathe an ancient cold in her face,
which makes her think of pancakes,

yeasty bubbles erupting from a warm skillet
with the sweet smell of maple syrup.

She steers down an aisle hoping to find a food court,
bends her knees and waves her hands, a thrasher,

leans toward a clearing with white tents
surrounded by grave markers and live peacocks.

Her gold wheels screech to a halt. A woman
whose flesh is attached to her arms in pasty lumps
steps out to meet her.

Maggie throws caution through a window, and breaks silence.
She asks for food.

So. Hungry Girl got money?

Maggie is only a poor girl without an allowance

who happens to be hungry.

And why is hunger, she asks herself, 

not its own winning argument?

She knows the only thing her fingers will find is lint.

She digs inside her pocket anyway.
Her hand strikes an empty seam bed.

Not so fast, says the Pasty Lump Lady.

Not so Lackawanna Railroad.

She says if Maggie dislocates a wheel from its axle

and gives it to the Pasty Lump Lady, breakfast will be served.

Pasty Lump Lady steals Maggie’s hunger.

She feeds her pancakes, eggs, syrup, until it is time to fold up shop,

uses the glint from the gold wheel 
to wrap sunlight inside her apron.

It was daylight just a few moments ago.

Maggie's mind is a basket filled with broken stuff.

She stuffs the skateboard under her arm.

Time to pack up what she jumped off.

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