YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
The Cage Walker
He shoves the .38
into his coat pocket
& walks back into
the dark. Night
takes him like a conveyer belt.
For a split second
he’s been there
in the ditch,
hood pulled from over a death’s-head.
He sits on a park bench.
Blue uniform behind every elm,
night sticks. He thinks how a man
enters the deeper, darker machine.
His fingers touch gun metal.
He stands & walks down
toward the wharf; ships rock
in white foghorn silence.
Water slams, steel doors
closing in a tunnel.
The quarter-moon goes blank
behind a cloud. He frames a picture
in his head, retraces footsteps
to Shorty’s Liquor Store.
He will go in this time.
He stands under a street lamp.
Moths float by
& he counts cars:
1, 2,3, 4, 5, aw shit.
A woman walks past & smiles.
Her red dress turns the corner
like blood in a man’s eyes.
He stares at his hands.
They say August is a good time
for a man to go crazy.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, The Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular. He has named his most important poetic influences as Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman.
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