Straight Paths
By Kwame Dawes
For Aba Josephine
To be introduced as a mountain of gray-blue beauty
at the end of that first chapter of chatty consideration—
this is the desire I carry, that moment of being announced
followed by the brooding silence of my presence—
such an effortless presence—while I consider the old dreams
of my childhood, my regrets and the laughter over
idle things. Remember when, Aba, you and I sat at table
and ate plates and plates of yam and corned beef,
the slimy skin of the boiled yams, the pepper and onion
of the tin corned beef—that manufactured salt-sweetness
offset by the hands of a Ghanaian woman determined
to season all intrusions into her existence, to make the alien
into the local—and we ate, beyond being full, ate beyond
desire, ate, for the sheer laughter of consuming and consuming.
I have sometimes forgotten that I ate with you to be
with you, to be part of a story with you, for I knew
that yam and corned beef was your delight, the pepper,
what you would call a favorite, and the legend of our
eating like this, was my desire, something I knew
we would share, something we would keep with us
all these years, even when you were still on the bed,
dearly departed, as they say. I have always been the chatty
raconteur in the scene, collecting these legends in my head,
entering and situating myself inside the narrative while
chronicling in the orchestration of their symmetry and balance
the narrative of our being. To say this now, in the city
of our remaking, is to say that I have always longed
to be the lurking shadow beneath the water’s surface,
a universe of mystery, waiting to breach the water
and fill all watching with a certain awe and assurance—
as it can be with God, arriving in the wind or in the storm,
making this blasphemy of a metaphor something sacred.
It has been years since I have walked the pavements
of Kingston, the paths of foot-trodden dirt, scattered
stones, and broken asphalt, moving with casual assurance
that no stumbling would fall me, easily navigating
the uneven ground. These days I catch myself calculating
the undulation of broken pavements in cities lined
with trees with intrusive roots, trees seeking to break
open the staid surface of construction, trees desperate
to shake off the heavy hand of the bricklayer. I consider
each hump and sway of the roadway, filled with the knowing
that soon the blurring will lead to a dance of the uncertain,
fixated on the detail of the immediate terrain—two feet ahead,
no further, every rise a new territory to be navigated,
such labor. Let us return to the hubris of where we began:
the end of that first chapter, the narrative preparing the way
for my arrival, the wit and charm a kind of forerunner,
preparing ye the way for my arrival, clearing away the stumbling
blocks, making even the uneven paths, that my feet
planted may be assured of steady ground.
