Green Linden Press

haibun at Monticello

            for Maura

through the woods      covered in draping green shadow       my cousin and I walk
            straight uphill                          for a while not talking                         just the distant
rush of cars                             then we talk for a long time      about my new position as
Director of Diversity for the Department        and her dream to make white people Understand
      (about this place, its fathers    still alive     still doing their founding deeds)
we talk:  where we’d like to live someday,        as if there’s a country better than this
you know how it goes              people think she’s White until she tells them she’s
not/won’t align with that violence—not to mention    our brown fathers (brothers), our
curly hair—      this story is old by now.

we cross wooden bridges over sodden patches                       soaked in from all the rain
       mosquitoes humming up to our ankles                sweat   cicadas   creaking oak
             Virginia becoming rainforest before our eyes            money will do that to a place
drown it    make it something else                  and when we get to the top of the hill   and cross the
road                and pass a graveyard               we are at the Visitors’ Center

Look, a man who thought he owned everything        is still being talked about on Sunday
afternoons in central Virginia: Look at his house, Look at his bed, Look at the view—
            and yes, slaves lived here, too.

we follow the tour guide along Mulberry Row          duck into a cool side wing of the big house
   and there, small homage to Sally Hemings—
                                    what we learn: she might have stayed in France, where she’d have been free                                  but that man, that man—

                                                            in this version sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings wins the
argument
                                                            takes up mending for the wealthy of Paris
                                                            saves enough to buy a small house for herself and
                                                            her young son. meets another man, who loves her.
                                                            she loves him. today no one knows her name other
                                                            than her great-great-great-great-grandchildren,
                                                            who speak fondly of their American ancestor
                                                            who wrenched herself away and mothered
                                                            alone for all those years in a foreign country.
nothing much else to say, besides
she baked a mean torte.

a story like this is why we are here—             we are not visitors

and where do we go? where do we go with it?


            we turn away from the big house and             its lies
trying to truth themselves greater

for a moment it’s unclear        how to pick up the path back down the mountain
                        but the graveyard appears again                     and we walk toward it

third attempt at going home

if not rejection of the commodification of my identity
if not neither here nor there
if not subject to crosswinds and climate change
if not a loose net of stories
if not always something there to remind me
if not a sonata                          if not a trinity              if not holy
if not a three-legged dog
if not the taste of bread
if not a manifestation of ego
if not a shadowy projection
if not a wild eel           if not electrifying and difficult to hold
if not an intergenerational rope of muscle
if not the negative of what surrounds it
if not black and white                                     if not covered in blood
if not a site of conscience
if not a sight of relief
if not a citation in the bibliography of self
if not requiring me
if not required for my sins of self
if not about ownership                        if not about the reappearance of names
if not about languaging existence onto land                         if not a survival mechanism
if not that which keeps a body in motion
if not an antidote to stagnation (death)
if not a bright dream burning as we run toward it
if not flammable as my hair                if not made of matchsticks and sugar cubes
if not an unreadable map to an empty room
if not a place to set everything down, to lay it out, to finally say what we are,
once and for all,
then I don’t know what.