Astral Caption (after an etching by Howardena Pindell, Cassiopeia, Andromeda [2003

Abstract

Astral Caption:(After an etching by Howardena Pindell, Cassiopeia, Andromeda [2003]) Brent Hayes Edwards (bio) I write to snatch the light away the way the stars bleed white from the rims of their sockets, the faint afterflash of how many dark paths of departure I write to intuit what trifles or looms beyond my vision, as a map is always a fanciful concatenation of what can't be known at once: Laventille, Ouagadougou, Takoradi, Newark, Belém. The map is many maps: capped turrets and cannonballs, spent, a charged symposium of gametes; bird tracks at dusk on a beach of volcanic sand; an archive of confused attack, index and cipher, sluice and retreat; a graveyard of chain links (uncoupled, tossed without ceremony) and hoes (dropped after digging); a blueprint of chutes and spires; glow worms trapped in tar. The stars migrate in tides of disarray. A constellation is a pack of incandescents traversing the plain. It is only susceptible to capture in the faint incisions it left as it came undone. [End Page 32] I write to ask the copper what it saw: a needle point slicing beeswax, it whispers, goose down on my skin . . . An astrologer is a humble tailor, stitching the closest fit for a body that died thousands of years ago. How does the night share its secrets? Taunting, indirection, the fugitive's black craft: The stars have left us. I write to constellate a leaving in a script only acid can read. Ink irrigates the furrows. And what gets hung? A window on the wall, a scribbled deposit of wounds. Brent Hayes Edwards Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor in the English Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2003) and co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). He is an associate editor of Callaloo. Copyright © 2006 Charles H. Rowell