I believe it was 1849 when a slave by the name of Henry
Brown, who was given the name Henry Brown,
escaped from Virginia into a free state.
I think Pennsylvania.
With the help of some collaborators,
he shipped himself-- was shipped--
in a parcel crate.
And soon, after getting to freedom, he became a showman.
He staged a traveling show that went
throughout-- up and down the East Coast,
and made it to Europe.
And he used a technology, theater technology
of the times, called the panorama.
The scrolling panorama.
And what this was was a huge painted backdrop on spools,
and as the backdrop would spool from one end of the stage
to the other, it would create the illusion
of moving through vast distances at a great speed.
So an actor on a horse or a fake horse
might look like they were traveling
through vast distances, vast open distances, which
we have now in car commercials.
And in the logic of any kind of settler colonialism,
you have to first imagine a land is empty enough, or filled
with bodies that don't matter enough,
to do stuff with that land.
And Henry Brown's genius was--
though Frederick Douglass hated him for putting on the show,
and exposing the way that he got free.
Henry Brown's genius, in my estimation,
is that he used the panorama, but he
made sure that it was thick with black bodies that
were being tortured and burned.
So as he's staging the rise, the escape from the box,
like a Lazarus being born from objecthood--
from chattel slavery, from possession-- into personhood.
He's emerging into that landscape.
Right?
Which begs the question, emerging into what?
The other reference in the poem, the contemporary performance
artist Marina Abramovic.
And night terrors.
Our kid had night terrors for a few years.
They're episodes that are not sleepwalking,
and they're not nightmares, and they're incredibly violent.
And the more that you try to comfort the child or the person
experiencing them, the more violent the person becomes.
Walking into a room with sadness made crystal touches me
on the thigh in a brotherly way.
I already know quickening flashes of teeth,
as people affirming a homeland are about to come.
But at any age, you can tell your architect what color glass
for the office park.
Low clouds reflected advance into their next sky,
next weather.
Let's say our right to pleasure is a withholding.
As a president lies in state, do you wake in state
as a medium screaming?
I carry no one in my eyes, not even a lane.
I don't know to where you can stretch your finitude a little.
I can be your thing.
You scream, you want, in your night terror, to bite my mouth.
Right side up with care, Henry "Box" Brown's
mirror of slavery panorama show interrupted
whose idea of escape.
The magisterial fields of the horse run,
dotting the rolling hills with char, with effects.
With bodies used for a whiteness, from which
Marina Abramovic's heroics would further
empty out, with a voiding majesty I don't trust.
Henry's fields give the lie.