First Date, and

First Date, and: Agnosis Joshua Bennett (bio) FIRST DATE I take my cue from the blizzardmaking a name for itself outsidethe café window: give myself awayin shards. First, each hour spenton the threshing floor, so hungryfor the force of the Lordthere were days I dared not move, poringover ancient law until the walls bled.Then, the flashing image of Princetonin 1856, every slave a young man bringsto campus dressed in black, an extra pairof hands to mend the trousers, or brushhis hair before bed. Then my father scalingthe side of our house with no ladder, too poorto call the locksmith. Then the blonde manon the A train last month; his broken nose turningeach fist into a bolt of red silk. Then my father again,but smaller this time. This time no one pities him.He is prettier than everyone else on the elevator.My mother still jokes about catching him catchinghimself in the switchboard’s reflection, as if an afroedNarcissus seconds before the fall, all thirty-two teethshining bright as Lucifer’s waistcoat. [End Page 253] AGNOSIS Living as I do,indeed, as anycontemporary Negro lives, at the pointof collision betweenour secular age & the blood-stainedsurrealism post-racial Americaengenders, I often catch myself praying to what I cannot name. The spacewhere I tend to think god isn’t sits like an acrylic crownchipped clean off during casualconversation, nary a sound to mark the break, fillthe wound, tonguenow in mad pursuit of the irretrievable.All that remains:blood without borders, metalpost & torpid bone,at this point, I’m sure you know whatI’m after. Howa body remembers [End Page 254] the character of whatis jettisoned from its hold:prosthetic, veneer, both simulacra & out-line, like a solid ghost.As if an entire angel, the moment of perilflashes up before me& I reach for the trees —out of some raw,decaying instinct,to be sure—all my wisdom alreadyash. I know. I know.Show some dignity. For wasn’t it my handsthat built the pyre, praisedthe flame, these lips which drank to the adventof a new, modern sensibility.You’re going to make me say it. Yes. Therewere days I yearnedfor the Paraclete’s visitation like a runof fish arrowing maplessthrough the incalculable gray, each spurred by impulseolder than any humanword for darkness. There were days I gavemy hunger to the air& did not go without. [End Page 255] Joshua Bennett JOSHUA BENNETT, winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, is a candidate for the PhD in English at Princeton University. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He has recited his original work at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He was recently elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and will join the Society as a Junior Fellow upon graduating from Princeton later this spring. Penguin Books will publish his first of collection of poems, The Sobbing School, in September 2016. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Art · Race, History, and American Society