by Philip Dacey

St. Louis. The Forties.    The neighborhood poor white.
(Or say white trash, given how when the flight
to the suburbs happened muddy lawns greened
all up and down the block, and newly black–owned
homes soon saw their values rocket upward.)
I’m five, playing in the sandbox in our backyard,
when a black child, a boy my age, appears
from out of the alley, sees me, stops and stares.
(Could this be the first such face–to–face
up–close encounter with the other race
for both of us?    And how did he come to be there?
His mother a cleaning–woman, and he came with her
until he wandered off, bored watching her dust?)
Suddenly I’m a host and he’s my guest.
I gesture toward the sandbox.    “Do you want to play?”
A wary look, then he decides to stay.
Little talk.    A shared scoop and pail.    To build
together, sand on sand.    Holes dug, holes filled.
A brotherhood of work a child can do.
Call it a dream.    An oasis in time.    Call it true.

Enter Mrs. Blandford — the point of this story —
one yard over, a figure of hysteria
on her back porch, waving her arms as she screams
at the boy to get out and stay out and seems
about to charge down her steps just as he
jumps up and scatters sand and dignity
to escape back into the alley, while I,
all wonder, as if lightning had split a blue sky,
don’t think to say — too young to have such sense —
“Our yards are separated by a fence
and what happens here is not your business,”
but instead sit still, beginning to score the loss
into memory, so that even long decades away
Mrs. Blandford will burn as fiercely as on that day.

by Philip Dacey

The female pianist’s long blonde lock
of hair swings down before her face
as she is playing fugal Bach.
The female pianist’s long blonde lock
tries unsuccessfully to block
Herr Bach, whose wigged hair stayed in place.
The female pianist’s long blonde lock
keeps perfect time before her face.

by Philip Dacey

     “My mother never let me wear black;
    now I wear black all the time.”
                                            Overheard remark

Some people dream in color,
others in black–and–white.
I dream in black;
I want to be a night sky without stars.
Each of my senses can apprehend blackness.

If black is the absence of all color
and white the presence of all color,
I want to be drained of the rainbow.
The void is black, and reigns.
If black were a tongue, it would say

in an instant, like a bolt of black lightning,
everything that is.    Those in exile,
either distantly or within
themselves, wear black
because the heart does.

A candle in the darkness
profanes your truest self.
Blow it out.    You’re a tunnel
with no light at either end,
and color’s a sentimentality, a lie.

The connoisseur of black
knows it comes in shades —
black, blacker, blackest.
Give back everything
to black.

by Pippa Little

fits in a palm
or snug in an eggcup.

Cool, undimpled shades
of lukewarm milk, magnolia emulsion,

plain and neat as clouds
on an indeterminate day.

A thing
either is or isn’t.

Crack.

Around wet suns
galaxies drift, that thing dances

on the head of a pin,
brain–stem, cortex, spine

uncoil then fuse. Consider crucibles:
who makes the Maker?

For world within worlds
look no further.