George Elliott Clarke

To—or Of—The Duchess of Alba

By “A Moor (Amour).”

I.

My prize for surviving the lash?
Goya’s “Helen”—
his slattern-Saturn—
Beauty bleached pale by soaking in milk.

Night after night, she’ll “fuck and fuck and fuck,”
so she swears,
witnessing our genitals, chained-and-locked,
as our faces wrestle, then relax,
as kissing ends and rough stuff starts.

I get to work the woman,
to fell her horizontal,
to toss her as one tosses out garbage,
and then take cava and lemon sorbet….

The Duchess of Alba—
or Duchess of Malfi
(same difference)—

ignores the debacle of alphabets
broken by imperial cannon—

and acts a Realist—
not a louse-infected Romantic
or a glacial Catholic—

as her cunt dribbles out conspicuously my sperm….

II.

When I engorge her sex, she believes the act
a kind of fluttering Adventure.

But, for me, it is sensual Sorrow,
that I must please a glittering viper—
nay—a spanking new sewer.

Naughty is our tussling,
but I am a haughty element—
a fuming shadow—
and could prove fatal.

Goya’s positive canvasses, his blank praise
of “My Last Duchess,”
illustrating her insufficient lips and fingers,
her straightforward, fainting colour,
do not suggest Eve in her Eden.

Rather, I see a shady lady skirting sunshine,
cheery amid sullen slaves.

When she admits her gangrenous pregnancy,
I grin at my ivory-assed adventuress.
Her whoremaster, Goya,
who fetishizes her as “vestida,”

might soon chop up her belly
as blunt as a blister,

when he discovers “the infestation.”

III.

Lemme turn her frisky haunches,
churn her rectum inside out,
enjoy her splendid ass-hole.
(The muddy orifice makes a darling pucker
to clasp my reaming charcoal.)

Now her body thrashes, heaves,
and the bed itself thumps with our rutting.

Our intricate pelts join,
and she emits startled giggles.
Soon, cold spasms stagger her tits and bum.

I beam at her bull-gored sex:
It looks like gleaming meat on bloody snow.
Witnessing “Jazz” (1910)
By W.E.B. Du Bois∗

(Exclusive to The Crisis)

The pianists sound argumentative as cannon,
while drummers bawl taps, knell cymbals;
bassists thread leaden webs of ebbing notes.
The banjo enthusiasts treat strings
as if they’re gears,
growling cranky into place.
Trumpets, trombones, cornets,
echo squadrons of strumpets, crones, nymphets….

The “performance” is convulsive ceremony.
Each dark face is saturnine; sour go mouths.

The rhythm paces illogical,
but is never, on reflection,
incorrect.

In the brothels (regrettably), in the bars,
where Buddy Bolden leads,
his combo executes—
yes, decapitates de capo—
th’ European metronome,
so that something African, primal,
audibly bloody,
screaming Warfare,
overtakes and ravages (ravishes)
Melody.

“Dulcet tones”
turn rancid, rotting to bone;
“sweetness” goes seedy or seeps acid.

Corruption stews in Storyville’s
sweaty, smoky sinks.

Each player’s got a rum cask for a brain,
a casket for a heart;
easy to hear banjo strings
as lynchers’ whistling ropes.

The jazzers deploy their instruments
like cheerful bombardiers,
but congress mid the crisscrossing notes
and beats,
at successful rendezvous—
rare as cannon shot hitting each other
in mid-air.

In those “Naw Leens” bordellos
(so I’ve heard it said),
the new music slaps ears
like adversarial gusts,
splashes boisterous murk,
until th’auditor’s engirdled
in intolerable swirls
of espaliered funk—
rococo siroccos.

In the bars I’ve attended—
(bleak like jail-cell bars)—
the black-soul musicians—
gargoyles in the gloom,
look down, leer at one,
from their cathedral-high perches of airs,
jittering melodies that imaginably imitate
concussive shames on clammy beds.

That’s the Negro purchase on Caucasian arias:
To show how they arise from the tom-tom heartbeat
of bump-n-grind amour.

Anyway, jazzers appear aristocratic in their Triumph,
bidding th’audience jitterbug
to sassy arrangements:

The piano crackles fire;
drums sound pompous musketry.

The ragtime exponents—

like Scott Joplin—

entangle one’s ears in “lagniappe”—
“a little something extra”—
like artillery allowed to frolic.

Our sable musicians conduct flippant rodomontade,
trumpet effrontery,
as they divvy up European scales
like decks of cards.

These imponderable artisans launch our ears
on an Odyssey of Debauchery,

as effective—
or detouring—
or destroying—
as the songs of Circe—
or the Sirens….

The jazzers bay and hooray
as kosher as the Devil.

I hear abortive canticles,
mortified epiphanies.

Some critics name this attitude “jive.”
No, I think it’s the shadow of Justice,

and this jittering in the music of the State
warns us, as Plato observes,

an earthquake is startling the foundations.

 

* Crook.
∗∗ Shipwrecked dude.
*** Small net.
**** See Yvette Christiansë: Fernão Lopes (d. 1545), rather than play conquistador to Goa, India, converted to Islam and rejected Portugal. Fine: The Portuguese cut off his right hand—and his nose, ears, tongue, and the thumb of his left hand. Plus, seashells were used to scalp his hair and skin his beard. He became St. Helena’s first exile, planting lemon groves and herding goats and pigs.
∗ Latin: Great sewer.
∗ W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1965), the ranking African-American intellectual of the 20th Century, was fairly conservative in his artistic tastes.

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