Sentence

          ~for James Baldwin

The sentence, you said, must be pared

to the bare bone. This was years after you left New York

for Paris, $40 in your pocket, with ragged duffle bag

of few clothing and early novel manuscripts

you would lose crossing the Atlantic.

You had to leave, you said, after your best friend

jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

You knew you would follow his flight,

would have gone under those dark waters.

You said, to be a black man in America

was to feel perpetual rage

that had to be creatively channeled

or it would consume others

and oneself. I have seen firsthand this rage engulfing

the most unlikely— Demby, 22, husband and father from Philadelphia,

joined a gang of fellow black soldiers, mugging,

vandalizing till turned in by undercover black brother,

sentenced to prison. Demby was my army buddy

who nicknamed me Cool Breeze

for my laidback attitude and originality.

This happened in the U.S. Army,

which I had joined with intuitive urgency:

Being the son of conscripted Hmong SGU soldier

who fought fifteen years under CIA orders, abandoned,

managed to escape across Mekong River

with pocketful of worthless kips, ragged clothing,

to start new life in America as janitor.

What he could show me was to fight

and to clean others’ messes, so I escaped

into the U.S. Army, pared my life to the bare bone

to find the essential, spent years among new brothers

rewriting my life word by word,

sentence by sentence, into a story

I can now understand. As I am now

beginning to understand my brother Demby;

you, Baldwin, his brother; and that wave of young Hmong American men—

my generational brothers who quietly suicided

in stuffy rooms and dusty garages,

and those who lived on

in shade-drawn rooms

or exploded with bats, knifes, guns

in narrow apartment-block alleys.

Yes, our sentences must be pared

to the bare bone.