EthicalDative

There must be a type of experience that isn’t uncommon among folk, yet is felt individually as epochal and singular. I classify it as contemplation of a certain prospect from a particular height in circumstances which combine to induce a geyser-burst of sheer animal spirits. A spasm of serene thrill, as it were, in which life and hope and possibility appear all rolled up in one and shimmering in the reachable distance. My moment happened at night on a modest hilltop in the vicinity of Villefranche-sur-Saône with lights winking in the shadowy expanses way off yonder. Breezes, stars, romantic partner, bit of wine, and blood thundering in its arteries. In my telling it sounds like a hackneyed cinematic trope, but Kwame Dawes made my French hilltop moment come surging back, mixed with sweet, stupid tears, in the finale of his poem “Walk ‘Bout.”*

It’s pertinent to mention the Bob Marley line with which Dawes prefaces the poem: Bless my eyes this morning.

Kingston is the poem’s place, haunted by ghosts loitering in the pens… a village of gutters and middens…, where a wheezing boy roams and knocks about, his shoes / worn down by the deformity of an old ankle wound. A turning point for the boy is the sound of reggae, psalming its apocalypse across this city. Until then, he says, I had no language for the holiness / of this Kingston.

That language is supplied by the griot (“It sipple out there”) and the roots man (“It slide out there”) calling me up / to the hills, and me walking, child astray, up Jack’s Hill, aimlessly moving toward a certain absence… from where I see / the city laid out before me, contained by sea and mountain…

Piecemeal summary is inadequate to how the poem masses itself toward its culmination in a kind of terrified joy. Its own “distilled language” is indispensable:

… far enough to become art, glorious enough to calm
my terror of predators and temptations, from there,
a city requires psalms, songs, and the distilled language.
I can’t say I knew this then, not in such clear holy
prophecy, but the impregnation of need did happen,
the disquiet of the anticipation of an unseen forming, a kind
of lamentation long before the amassed dead drew
closer to my door. Bless my eyes, oh God, bless my eyes.

The hook, for me, is the elusive specificity, the dark clarity, that starts with the child aimlessly moving toward a certain absence, and rolls forward in prepositional phrases: … but the impregnation of need did happen, / the disquiet of the anticipation of an unseen forming…

I was a mid-twenties child on my French hilltop. Kwame Dawes connects me with a complex hippity-hop. The gap between “a certain absence” and “an unseen forming” — stunning multivalent formulations — is where youth ends and whatever follows it starts.

*Published in the June 2024 issue of Poetry (not yet available on the Poetry Foundation website at this writing.)

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