Visiting Hours at the Color Line: Poems

“These remarkable poems are in conversation with us: our culture, our history, our ghosts. Even after enraptured multiple readings, I am incapable of succinctly praising this poet’s immense talent and this new book’s urgent, beautiful complexities.”
—Terrance Hayes

“To fully enjoy the sweet complexity and gravity-defying genre blending in Visiting Hours at the Color Line, one has to first put aside fears of postmodern tricksterism and fake-outs, then come to believe that ‘talk’ happens without words. Inside Ed Pavlic’s staunch, idiomatic phrasings and syntactic figurations is a heart bursting with sharp observations and a desire to read the nonverbal signs that point to and record our supreme humanity.”
—Major Jackson

“Ever since I discovered Ed Pavlic’s poetry, I find myself measuring other authors against the steady stream of his voice, and the heart and politics one finds in his short and long lines—the very sound of freedom.”
—Hilton Als

“These poems don’t prove, but play within the fundamental suspicion that ethics and erotics are one. It is a tune we need to hear: one that lulls where sleep rightly beckons, and one that wakes as exactly where it is we must be awake.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick

Praise for Ed Pavlic

“Ed Pavlic’s poems are rituals for awareness. A stunning contribution to international literature.”
—Nathalie Handal

“There’s a beauty embodied in this poet’s straightforward journey.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa

“Ed Pavlic’s poetry balances itself on a tightrope of musical strings strung across a precipice between the irrational and the rational. The body of his work is a kind of musical instrument: horn-guitar-percussion-words. Like jazz he wants to be without notaion, but he is a poet, stuck with language, various cultures that have caught his attention. And reading him is a theatrical experience.”
—Stanley Moss

“The tension in Ed Pavlic’s poems is a language-cable wrought to swing you out over unnerving spaces, let you see and hear what they really hold, and bring you back up more alive than you were before. Dialogic, dangerous, this is a poetics of body and soul, music to listen to with all five senses.”
—Adrienne Rich

Ed Pavlic is the author of five previous books, including Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue. His awards include The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, among others. In 2012, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute. Pavlic teaches at the Universiy of Georgia and lives in Athens.

By the time the second tower fell the Humanities lounge had filled up with staff and professors and students. I stood there and stared into the dust on TV. I was suddenly conscious that I’d spent years coaxing what I saw and heard, charting it as it traveled ox bow routes thru me. The dust disappeared the building. As I went thru the doorway, Bill said, “it’s gone.” I left the lounge and walked cross campus, the upstate sky unbroken blue. Kids on the library steps weeping in groups. I’d had a recurring dream where the students and faculty of the college paraded between classes holding their brains in glass jars, suspended in clear fluid. My thought then, “I guess neither approach is much good.” Jackson Garden is back behind the Campus Center. I walk thru the stone gates feeling the towers and the dust and the broken glass of bodies pulse in my arms and legs where I’d coaxed the world to go. I see Thanha Nguyen, an exchange fellow in Modern Languages. When we met she’d told me that she grew up in Hanoi during the American War.

ii

Last Spring, we read Dien Cai Dau in my seminar. I’d invited Ms. Nguyen to attend the class. I bought her a copy of the book and got Yusef to sign it for her. Her English wasn’t great. She said it was hard for her to read in English when she missed her children like she did. I asked. A boy and a girl, 9 and 13. She read the book and came to class. She didn’t say much. She turned to the poem “Tunnels” and told us that her school had been moved to a village outside Hanoi because of the bombings and that, for the first term, the teachers had worked with the students to dig tunnels like the ones in the poem. They were told to hide in the tunnels when they heard the sirens from the city. She said, after a few weeks, the tunnels filled with water and rats lived in them and none of the students would go in. Instead, they stood there around the opening to the tunnel listening to the sirens wishing the rain would stop. That’s what she said. And, she turned to the poem “Prisoners” and asked if this writer was for or against the war. She asked why he wanted to bow to the enemy. I explained that the book’s not really about enemies. It’s about kinds of power and how they interact. Military, cultural, ancestral, erotic, psychological, masculine, feminine. I could tell she wasn’t really listening. I pictured her standing in the rain. I stopped. She said, why did he want to bow to the enemy?

iii

By the time I entered the garden I’d concluded that only a real fool would coax this fucking world into his body like I have. Naïve. My legs feel like they were sketched in pencil and then, mistaken, worked over with a wide eraser. I walk up to Ms. Nguyen and say hello. I can’t decide if the burnt rubber smell is from the city or the scatter of tiny, hot twirls of the eraser burning my legs. She’s staring into flowerbeds that bristle and hum with bees in the perfect sun. She : how are you? I ask if she’d heard. Heard? I say terrorists attacked New York City. Terrible. Could be ten thousand dead. No one knows. Ms. Nguyen’s eyes turn to mine, she hands me her camera, “would you take my photo with these flowers?”

VISITING HOURS AT THE COLOR LINE

These Stateville phones won’t speak the words.
The night we slept together

in your cold furnace
of a project bedroom. Place so full of faces,
we drew circles around each

other. Love. Anger

thick as smoke from James Sr.’s chalk-faced

wife.
Her white sons down
the hall. Their metal gong in the air.

Your older brothers? I’m rolling thunder,
fire and rain. When it comes
to evil,

I’m a hurricane. Sugarbear
in diapers with sand hair and ash legs.
Pre-Desert Storm Anthony

still had legs and ran low and
studied his French in a green

haze. Still sent us on dollar-a-joint runs
to 301 Building
B. This glass is bullet

proof.
You toss your head : “the white witch
of the north.”

We don’t talk about that first
frozen night on fire
with Sugarbear’s baby blanket. A smoke ring

curls in the empty air, I see her
lip-line draw up and I didn’t want to hear it

cock-suckers then and I don’t want to remember it now