By Walter R. Holland
Belt, suit and trousers—
how hurried I was, like in a fire,
salvaging catch-as-can the valuables to dress you in, as at the door
a pounding fist demands egress and yes, the whole world
had sounded its alarm and in that moment the battering hatchet,
time, broke in. My mind, not yet forty, but smoldering nonetheless
by the rifling of the hard-right's men. Panic seized and blistering contagion, a rueful scent like incense from some backroom shrine, more musk and holy jism—your boyhood wish to be a saint and stand with hands crossed in prayer, changed to a second coming, out of Haiti's famine, you ascended in long, gloved hands—Yoruba's orisha queen, drag goddess to the crowd, when New York, made home, became tinder-box, you, proud Assotto, named for the drum and rebel, fiery tropics in your head, baptized in outspokenness and sacred hypocrisies, broke stony catechism, red-lipped and cocoa-colored, giant-heeled and giant dress, confessed to a love of head-on action; bastard of New World islands, French and patois, voodoo maitresse and white-man lover, called to the self-denying neighbors 'get out, flee!'—what to drag from a country all on fire? The leather vest? Studs? A rhinestone earring and a pearl? Books? Songs? Your press? And after saving it all, who saves you? Business suit and lace-up shoes, drag for a working life, profanities of paper raging on your desk—poetry, the fuse—like a torch, your voice, raced on its path to nowhere, flaming where no God forgives. Assotto, I live dressed in you and you are fire going to fire— the scream that begs for rescue.
( For Assotto Saint aka Yves Lubin, gay Haitian American poet, 1957-1994 )
Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of two books of poetry, 'A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992' and 'Transatlantic,' as well as a novel, 'The March.' He teaches literature at the New School in New York City and is also a physical therapist.