Apologies for History
On the discovery of George Washington’s slave quarters at Independence Park, Philadelphia

I.
archaeology’s gift:
the power to turn a pile of rocks
into a cache of shame. 

II.
step this way, 
beyond the cordoned off line
to see the cracked Bell and the Hall 
where exalted men 
sweated through their wigs
drafting independence
one muggy Philly July.

just over here, to these 
rough dug-outs, these 
catacomb like series of rooms 
where they must have lived, worked— 

storeroom, cold cellar, claustrophobic living 
quarters shared by many men (women perhaps
bunking in attics or made to curl up 
like housecats on mats in the kitchen).
a passage sunk underground
snuck them around
so they wouldn’t raise 
eyebrow or ire in the abolitionist city.

III.
they had the usual slave names, the sort
of thing you might call your dog— 
Austin, Paris, Moll, a cook 
named Hercules. we don’t know
when they died,  who was their next 
of kin or where their bones finally lie, only 
that two of them disappeared 
down cobblestone streets
into freedom. two succeeded. 
several tried.

IV.
now all that remains are some coarse walls
where the well-meaning stand and offer
Pan-African blessings as if putting 
the whole thing to bed, hoping with an adequate 
lullaby it might sleep soundly,
eternally.

in the end, it’s just another canker sore
in the mouth of history, the sort of thing 
that festers and aches but doesn’t show up 
in a tight enough grin.
nothing’s made right by commemorative plaques
or apologies for history
but like dutiful children, we try. 
we strip the varnish from our own gods, 
operating on the slim hope that eventually 
some hero will emerge, without 
the subterfuge, without
the dark, subterranean secrets,
teaching us some better way 
to be human.





Requiem in the Key of Spring


What a catch in my throat 
to remember you’re gone,
on a day like today, when winter 
begins to roll back, first thick leaves 
of tulip and daffodil emerging from the dirt 
like tiny verdant flags unfurling, each 
a go ahead to dream, to go on 
with life. The soil is just warm enough 
to walk on in just socks (to the bewilderment 
of the mailman) and trigger
some muscle memory. Soon enough, 
I’ll be cupping hands, scooping up 
garden soil, knowing it teems 
with life, that it did even when covered 
with a thick exoskeleton of ice. 

This time of year you would’ve been 
willing to toast your forebears with a giant 
eye roll, any excuse to drink green beer. 
Joe, I shouldn’t have let so many years 
go by, relying on a frenetic universe 
to bring us back into collision and collusion, 
as we were so often, once-- bodies, minds, words. 
You always joked you never knew my mind, 
as if  it were too convoluted to fully grasp. 
Really it was just cowardice 
that kept me aloof, a terror of this--
of loving and letting go. 

Now, as the whine of the heater cuts off, 
I can open the window, let a Stones album 
make its scratchy loops around 
the record player, songs seeping out
into the brisk spring air. They say plants 
grow stronger if you sing to them. 
I saw the box they planted you in, 
and you inside, mannequin made up 
into somebody else. 

I don’t know where the spirit goes, 
if it rolls up tight like a scroll and bobs
on the firmament, a message in a bottle, 
or if it anchors deep into the earth, a root 
with so many fibrous shoots. I think I know 
this is not all. Either you’re here now, 
somehow, or I’ll see you again, 
on that other shore. ​