Poem-a-Day DBF countdown: James Allen Hall

The Aug. 26 cover story “Monsters of Poetry” put the spotlight on the poet’s art to preview the fourth annual Decatur Book Festival, running through today, Sep. 6. The final entry in the Poem-a-Day countdown through the festival is “A Fact Which Occurred in America” by James Allen Hall.

“A Fact Which Occurred in America”

In the fifth grade, when we came finally to the Civil

War, the teacher kept saying, We lost, we lost,

his eyes a shadowy grief under his favorite painting,

a laminated Dawe reproduction subtitled A fact

which occurred in America: a black man wrestling a buffalo

to the ground. The ground becomes his grave, I am the buffalo.

In the painting of the buffalo rolling his eye

to size up the man who will never be strong enough

to wrestle his way out of the definition of black,

I am trying to say, we are metaphors for each other, please

don’t kill me. The man is black but so is the buffalo,

so is the sky and so is the heart which keeps this fact holy.

In the painting I am the buffalo because I want to be loved

by pure physicality, a man with broad hips and broader anger

and a yoke around his neck which has not broken him

yet. In the painting about a buffalo’s last breath,

I am the dust matted on the lips. Kiss me, keep me

in your mouth, don’t let me dissolve into fact.