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June 2004
A Poem by Thylias Moss
The
Rapture of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin as
the Moment of the Soul’s Apotheosis
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 How will we get used to joy
if we won’t hold onto it?
Not even extinction stops me; when
I’ve sufficient craving, I follow the buffalo,
their hair hanging below their stomachs like
fringes on Tiffany lampshades; they can be turned on
so can I by a stampede, footsteps whose sound
is my heart souped up, doctored, ninety pounds
running off a semi’s invincible engine. Buffalo
heaven is Niagara Falls. There their spirit
gushes. There they still stampede and power
the generators that operate the Tiffany lamps
that let us see in some of the dark. Snow
inundates the city bearing their name; buffalo
spirit chips later melt to feed the underground,
the politically dreadlocked tendrils of roots. And this
has no place in reality, is trivial juxtaposed with
the faces of addicts, their eyes practically as sunken
as extinction, gray ripples like hurdlers’ track
lanes
under them, pupils like just more needle sites.
And their arms: flesh trying for a moon apprenticeship,
a celestial antibody. Every time I use it
the umbrella is turned inside out,
metal veins, totally hardened arteries and survival
without anything flowing within, nothing saying
life came from the sea, from anywhere but coincidence
or God’s ulcer, revealed. Yet also, inside out
the umbrella tries to be a bouquet, or at least
the rugged wrapping for one that must endure much,
without dispensing coherent parcels of scent,
before the refuge of vase in a room already accustomed
to withering mind and retreating skin. But the smell
of the flowers lifts the corners of the mouth as if
the man at the center of this remorse has lifted her
in a waltz. This is as true as sickness. The Jehovah’s
Witness will come to my door any minute with tracts, an
inflexible agenda and I won’t let him in because
I’m painting a rosy picture with only blue and
yellow (sadness and cowardice).
I’m something of an alchemist. Extinct.
He would tell me time is running out.
I would correct him: time ran out; that’s why
history repeats itself, why we can’t advance.
What joy will come has to be here right now: Cheer
to wash the dirt away, Twenty Mule Team Borax and
Arm & Hammer to magnify Cheer’s power, lemon-scented
bleach and ammonia to trick the nose, improved—changed—
Tide, almost all-purpose starch that cures any limpness
except impotence. Celebrate that there’s Mastercard
to rule us, bring us to our knees, the protocol we follow
in the presence of the head of our state of ruin, the
official with us all the time, not inaccessible in
palaces or White Houses or Kremlins. Besides every
ritual is stylized, has patterns and repetitions
suitable for adaptation to dance. Here come toe shoes,
brushstrokes, oxymorons. Joy
is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers
of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers.
Let heartbreak be alternative to coffeebreak, five
midmorning minutes devoted to emotion
Thylias Moss, professor of English, was born
in Cleveland in 1954 and is widely identified as among the most
outstanding living poets.
“I am not satisfied with my poems unless they have attempted
some reaching, some moving toward a more that ever moves away,
that is occupied with its own reaching,” Moss has written.
A 1981 graduate of Oberlin College, she got her master of fine
arts in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire,
where Charles Simic “lit a fire under me.”
When those devoted to labels term her a “Black Female
Poet,” Moss has said that she will accept the label because “I
am a person whose ancestors were brought to this country from
Africa—but it has not very much of anything to do with
how I view the world.” And although she admires groundbreaking
contemporary writers like Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, she
declares firmly, “If no Black woman had ever written anything,
I would have written. I don’t mind adding to the African
American female aesthetic—whatever that is, I hope it is
not easy to define.”
Moss’s many volumes of poetry include Slave Moth:
a Narrative in Verse, Small Congregations: New and
Selected Poems, Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler:
Poems and Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky:
Poems.
Moss has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1989;
the Pushcart Prize, 1990; Dewar’s Profiles Performance
Artist Award in Poetry, 1991; Witter Bynner Prize, American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1991; Whiting Writer’s
award, 1991; Guggenheim fellowship, 1995; and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship,
1996.
Michigan Today profiled Professor Moss in October
1995. The article is available at http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/95/Oct95/mt8o95.html
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