Aperture

Grandma Gracie’s death left a space in her heart my mother could not ll, even with the ve of us, and my father, who called her Bessie. Kala was often there with her, as she was his babysitter. However, none of us could take the space of her mother. e special bond between the two of them had much to do with the love my mother felt her mother withheld from her. As summer faded into fall, and the rst anniversary of my grandmother’s death approached, it seemed the house was still full of her spirit. Bessie went in and out of sadness, still holding onto her sense of humor.

When I called her by the nickname my father gave her, she would reprimand me with a smile. “I’m your mother, boy.”

Shift work took a special toll on my family life, and to that toll I added my ambition. Eight hours in a factory was at least nine hours away from home with 30 unpaid minutes for lunch, and traveling time. It took only 20 minutes to get to P&G’s plant in South Baltimore from where Ronnie and I lived. When her health permitted, she was a Civil Service worker, an administrator rst at Ft. Meade and later the large Social Security complex in Woodlawn, an area just outside the western edge of the city. While my favorite shift was the second, from four in the afternoon until 12:30 in the next morning, Ronnie always worked the daylight shift. On weekends we sometimes had Kala with us, as his mother and I shared joint custody. Ronnie and I had a marriage with a feeling of detente, as she watched me doing things she either did not understand or did not care to understand. We were not an anomaly, as we knew other couples who did not connect with each other in deeper ways. However, while some other men at work talked about what they were building with and for their families, I had my one dream, and one day a coworker disabused me of the feeling of being special.

“Everybody’s got dreams, Mike.”

It would have been enough if all I wanted was to be the rst great Black poet in Langston Hughes’s prophecy, but I wanted to master Taijiquan in the process. Taiji alone requires a lifetime. Claiming a prophecy on one hand, while simultaneously committing to studying an Asian system of cultivation, I occasionally sat on my sweeper in an empty truck door

in the warehouse looking out at the world, wondering what it was like in places invisible to me, places where poets were born in circumstances seemingly more suited to a literary life, poets such as people I got to know in Washington, DC, Black folk born to educated parents and in closer proximity to the middle class. At those times, I had moments of feeling unreasonable, as if I was asking too much of a God I no longer trusted, one I was beginning to see more as the unspeakable Dao, or its origins. At other times I thought the emotional pain of my life gave me a right to aspire to the impossible, not understanding that maybe my being born had broken a rule made by a system that consumed people and threw them away. Coming to Baltimore just after wwii, and the rst deployment of nuclear bombs, my parents traveled northward to struggle in a system designed to defeat them. ey were determined to reach beyond themselves and build a family.

To dream is to be human. I understood that, but some other parts of me believed my journey was my soul work, what I was born to do, which might have seemed like a peculiar arrogance to other people.

Each move in Taiji has objectives. e most obvious is to get to another part of your practice area. e less obvious include opening passageways for the body’s energy to ow, to allow the major organs to move against one another as in a massage. e heart is the body’s generator, so it provides the necessary ingredient for major functions, such as the brain and nervous system’s workings. Done as meditation, keeping one’s mind on the movements enhances these functions. Much of the orientation of the body in practice has to do with Chinese theories of how the human body is connected to and works with the natural world, from the more obvious air required for breathing to more seemingly esoteric ideas of how the actual functioning of the body is a microcosm of the way matter and energy move in the universe. If practiced into old age, should life be given that long, we see the movements are quite ordinary, the reaching and turning, even the small leaps, the grabbing and twisting that are so subtle they are given names such as plucking the guitar, when in fact they are for locking and breaking joints if need be. Without knowing it, we get ourselves in places with doors and windows we did not know existed, and before long we have to learn the broad science of how the world is made, with all its hidden

dangers, and how we are made to do what we do when doing it can cost more than what we want to pay.

So it is with anyone wanting to be a poet, or believing themselves to have been born that way. Either way, we are gardens that need tending.

He was talking about the random axe of God, his hand slamming the table like a battle axe, and though I was a nonbeliever, I believed (I knew) we were sitting, against all odds, together, with nothing but a checkered tablecloth between us, in North Bay, where the maître d’ embraced him and seemed to want to hug me too. e man had written to say he’d known my father would die one day, that he’d been preparing nearly forty years for that, since he was seventeen, and had needed a psychiatrist roughly his father’s age, Jewish, and on the right bus line. By then, he said, his father had been dead ve years. My father, he said, was the rst person he confessed his love of men in dark suits to. How gentle he was, the man said. How wise. He was the father I didn’t have, the man said, and I thought, he was the father I didn’t have either. e man was a public defender and when the waiter brought the wrong cut of beef, he said, Everyone is innocent of something. We were sitting like two people who had met in another life and were trying to catch up. I asked what had happened to his father and he said swimming and Acapulco. He said shark. And it occurred to me that we were breaking breadsticks together because a sh had mistaken a man for something else. It’s a big, random axe. “It Never Entered

My Mind” was playing above and around us––a sea of Sinatra. at was your father’s favorite, the man said, which surprised me, because I always thought my father liked music unburdened by words, the way he liked his evenings with us. I didn’t tell the man about the app you can get now, how it tells you where sharks are in real time. I didn’t tell him about the woman who reaches into the mouths of hammerheads to cut hooks out, how after she’s pulled a hook from one shark, others approach, sensing ––no, knowing––she means to help them. at’s a belief system. e world is teeming with them, and leaving the restaurant, the man pointed out, as men tend to, the stars comprising Orion’s Belt––as if it were the lustrous sparks and not the leveling dark that connects us.

She stepped out of it

and day was everywhere.

Madrid struggles with record snows,

with roses and rowboats, with the center of all roads

and even e Triumph of Death snowed in.

Meanwhile, I sit with my chipped

plate of churros, with my broken

eggs. Who can eat? ere have

been so many nos, but this

one fell from her

lips. It buries me.

For Scott Harney

I wanted to steal something from the bathroom at the cathedral––a basinet or plastic hand towel dispenser––anything that wasn’t nailed down, though, in the sanctuary, I was eyeing those things too: the pews and oak podium, the organ pipes and bright eyes in the faces of stained glass saints. I contemplated taking the hammereddown hands and feet of Jesus in a painting that was faded and sad and anatomically incorrect. Of course, what I wanted was faith––faith in the mysteries, faith in some life after this one, faith that we might still see him kneeling up ahead on the cooled path to Mt. Vesuvius, still handsomer than Sal Mineo, pretending to tie his shoe, making it a double knot, while we catch up.

Tijani was an avid watcher, the only child to a single parent with no sibling to look up to, no one to play with. His mother, Mama Agnes, was a social studies teacher and a disciplinarian. Going out to play was often not allowed. When Tijani was not in school or doing homework or thumbing through his father’s old books, he busied himself with whatever was around, playing with what he could get his hands on— empty milk cans, bottle tops, the soft tube inside an abandoned tire. ere was the old camera that Mama Agnes said used to belong to his father. Although it didn’t work, he used it anyway, spying on the streets through its cracked lens. ey lived on the second oor of a tenement building and from the louver window he could see the street bustling with life. Every morning he woke to the barking of mongrels and the smell of fresh bread from the bakery across Adamu Street. Sometimes the smell of goat fur and feces came out before the aroma of cheap pastries. e revving of commuter buses invaded his dreams as they began their early morning shift before daybreak. He watched store owners clog the gutters with trash when they thought no one was watching. He watched people lose their money to pickpockets and muggers. He watched bus conductors ght bloody over passengers. rough the other window, he watched neighbors brush their teeth vigorously and spit red foam into the gutter in the backyard before lining up to use the outhouse and bathroom. At the outhouse, towels and wrappers hung on walls or acted as drapes to shield naked bodies, and sometimes he saw women in ways that gave him impure but pleasant thoughts. He took it all in—the noise, the people, the depravity, the smells.

“Work hard and make money so your children won’t have to live in a place like this. No child deserves to grow up like this,” his mother would say. He knew his mother was ashamed to show people where they lived. He was sometimes ashamed too and often wondered why their family was not like others in his school whose parents sent drivers to pick them up and lled their bags with expensive snacks for their lunch breaks. His mother never missed the opportunity to remind him how fortunate he was to be enrolled in Montessori school on a scholarship. Tijani saw her face burn

with life’s frustration whenever she returned from work. Sometimes she took her frustration out on him by throwing a backhand slap.

In those times, he disliked his mother and wished his father never left them. His memory of his father faded as he grew older. He remembered running his ngers through his coarse beard as his father laughed. He remembered how his father would sit with his friends in the living room and burst into side-slapping and uproarious laughter like a generator with a faulty engine, gurgling into life, spluttering and dying before roaring back again. He also remembered the ghts between his father and his mother, how the screaming matches escalated into the throwing of shoes. He remembered how terri ed he was even though he was too young to understand what was going on.

His mother also said, “Make sure you marry well so you won’t have to carry the burden of life alone.” at was the closest he heard her talk about his father other than he was a bumbling drunk who abandoned his family.

When he turned ten, his mother’s work yielded results. She came home one day the happiest she had been in a long time. She told him she made headteacher in school. Her promotion came with a housing loan from the government, and she said that they would be moving to a new house in an estate. It would just take a few months.

In the end, they moved to the estate in Ikorodu, a house with no plastering—his mother’s government loan had only gone so far. She threw his father’s things into a polythene bag: the camera, his books––Encyclopedia Britannica and Americana, his dusty pile of Dickens, Hardy, Fitzgerald, Dickinson and what not. She intended to have the bag incinerated, but Tijani tucked it away while she was busy packing. ere had been no photographs, only the broken camera. It was like having a mind without memory. Had his father bothered to leave some pictures behind he would have had something besides a broken camera and mildewed books to hold on to.

With three bedrooms and a spacious living room, the house was in a gated community. Some of the properties were still empty and his nearest neighbor was in the next section. It didn’t matter that she moved the dusty furniture from the old house there. It didn’t matter the shower wasn’t yet

working and the toilet plumbing wasn’t right. It didn’t matter that the electrical wiring of the house was out of whack. It didn’t matter that he looked through the window from the room upstairs and saw trees and tile roo ng hemmed in by tall fences. What mattered was that he no longer lived in the bad part of town just like she always wanted. Part of him was unhappy to leave the house on Adamu Street, but part of him appreciated his mother’s struggle to pull them out of poverty. As he grew older, he became more appreciative of what she had done. She started allowing his friends to visit from time to time. She even decided to throw birthday parties for him.

How could he forget that Christmas Eve, when his mother drove to Elegushi Beach and let him play, making his heart burst with joy. How he ran close to the waves and dug his toes into the wet sand. How he closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the sun. How he cupped water in his hand and tasted it. He searched for pebbles and pearls, gathering some into his pocket. He took fake pictures of the cobalt blue sky with his father’s broken camera.

Tijani is one with the camera as he looks through the lens with his right eye and jostles for space amongst other photographers hired by the couple’s relatives and coworkers––the bride’s father’s photographer, the groom’s mother’s photographer. e photographer from the bride’s place of work. e photographer from the groom’s secondary school Boys Scouts club.

Tijani, the bride’s photographer, twists himself into the right posture, aiming his lens at the couple. e bride wears a owing white gown with sprinkles of crystals, her nervous face bright with makeup, and her smooth hair held tight with a glittering hairpin. Her veil is the length of her torso. e groom’s full, well-oiled beard catches the candescence pouring from a uorescent light above him. Tijani notices happiness in the groom’s eyes but no smile on his lips, as if he is trying to contain something bubbling inside him. His black, three-piece suit is almost spotless. ere is a little of what’s on the bride’s gown on his lapel—crystal dust. As Tijani clicks away,

he wonders who will be the rst to let loose—that expression of joy after solemnization, that burst of relief, that overwhelming happiness that knows no bounds. It’s a little game he plays in his head. He predicts the groom will be the rst to release ungovernable peals of joy.

Click! Click! Click! rough one eye, he visualizes the photo before he takes it, sees everything in the same two-dimensional manner the camera will record it–– clear, sharp, focused. He wants to capture every tiny detail of this auspicious moment. Telling the story of love is important to him. He doesn’t really have to know them before he tells the story of their love. at’s why he thinks his job is important. ey will open an album lled with his pictures ten years down the line, and the photographs will bring smiles to their faces, tears to their eyes. eir household will be lled with children. He wishes them well. He always wishes them well. e priest approaches the couple as the entire congregation stands. Tijani directs his lens at the crowd. Click! Click! Click! Colorful clothes. Mostly happy faces but clammy with heat. Hand fans ap stylishly. A lady with a wide brim hat is beyond decorous. She dabs the corner of her eyes with a handkerchief, tears washing the mascara down her face, her mouth contorted with a sweet, bitter smile. He turns the camera at her. Click! Click! Click. He wonders what her story is. e couple exchanges their vows. Click! Click! Click! Tears form in the eyes of the bride and the groom. Click! Click! Click! More people in the congregation tear up. Click! Click! Click! e priest blesses the couple, joins their hands, and says to the groom, “Do you take her as your lawful. . . .” He then faces the bride and says the same thing. More clammy smiles, more tears. Click! Click! Click. ere is the exchange of rings and nuptial blessings. e recessional song lls the air; slow music streams out from a keyboardist, drummer, and guitarist. Choristers in red berets then sing praise songs. Click! Click! Click! As the couple makes their way down the aisle, the bride sways her arms slowly in the air and snaps her ngers. en suddenly, the music turns to something upbeat, and she tugs at her skirt to adjust to the rhythm, snapping and swaying joyously. Well-wishers with BlackBerries swarm

around them. Camera lights glare into her happy eyes. He smiles behind his camera. e bride wins his little game. . . .

After wiping sweat from his brow, he chases the couple down the aisle, clicking away, pressing through the crowd. e day is just beginning.

He captures their special moments all day—the post-ceremony photography session, moments before the reception, the reception, the time after the reception. e wedding ends, and when he nally puts his camera into his pouch, tired to the bone and ready to eat, he still sees the world through one eye. e other can’t see.

ree days after Tijani’s thirteenth birthday party, he heard gunshots, the impact of which threw him o the living room couch. He had heard the faraway sounds of gun re in his former neighborhood like the distant sounds of the train but nothing this close, nothing this relentless. He heard screams and more gunshots and went at on the ground, his cheeks feeling the cold, rough tile of the oor. His mother screamed his name, and without thinking he sprang up and ran to her bedroom.

“Armed robbers in the estate,” his mother said, voice quivering with fear. She was on the oor behind the window, shaking terribly. He got to her and wrapped his arms around her to comfort her as she swallowed the fresh cry bubbling to her lips. ings became quiet for a few seconds, and he could hear his mother’s heavy breathing. He could feel cold sweat on her body. He tried to keep his breathing steady. He tried to calm his racing heart.

He heard a crash through the door and within seconds three men barged into his mother’s bedroom. ey had long ri es. ey lay their guns on her bed and two sprang upon her. e other dragged Tijani away, screaming into his ears, spitting in his face. e smell of tobacco and rotten eggs assailed him. He called out to his mother as he struggled. e rst slap landed on his face, and he was ordered to lie at on the ground. His face burning, his tongue tasting his own blood, he succumbed. While lying