Unending Deployment
The poem haunts me. I receive one poem a day via email from the poetry foundation. Most I read once and discard due to my inability to resonate with the words. This one gets to me.
It describes the speakers encounter with a “crazy” street preacher, Brother Rickey, while waiting for the pedestrian crosswalk light by the side of a street in Washington DC. Turns out that the preacher is a purveyor of a ” Streetwise” type of publication which he sells for two dollars apiece. The topic of conversation between the speaker (the poet) and the street preacher is a comparison between race and climate change.
CONSCRIPTION
BY Kyle Dargan
“We can no longer afford that particular romance.”
—James BaldwinBrother Rickey halts me before I cross East
Capitol. He trumpets that we are at war.I want to admit that I don’t believe in “white”
—in the manner that Baldwin did not—but BrotherRickey would simply retort that my disbelief
is no immunity from the imaginations of thosewho think themselves “white.” As we await
the stoplight’s shift—so I may walk and he mayholler “Final Call!” between lanes of idle traffic—
I think of race as something akin to climate change,a force we don’t have to believe in for it to kill us.
I once believed in the seasons. (I fantasizefall as Brother Rickey’s favorite—when his suits,
boxy and plaid, would be neither too hot northin.) But we are losing spring and fall—tripping
from blaze to frost and back. And what’s to saywe won’t soon shed another season, one of these
remaining two, and live on either an Earthof molten streets or one of frozen light? That’s when
worlds end, no—when, after we’ve eradicatedourselves, we become faint fossils to be exhumed
by the curiosities of whichever life-forms followour reign? I still owe Brother Rickey two dollars
for the paper he last placed in my hand, calling me“soldier.” I don’t have to believe that I am enlisted
in order to understand he’ll forgive my debtso long as this idea of “whiteness” sorties above us—
ultraviolet, obliging an aseasonal, unending deployment.Released by the signal, I advance—my head down,
straining to discern the crossfire from the cover
Kyle Dargan is the Assistant Director of creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C., where he also lives. His new book of poems, Anagnorisis will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2018.
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