Spirit Boxing

By Afaa Michael Weaver

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780822982814

Afaa Michael Weaver

Shannon Maguire is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. The author of two collections of poetry fur(l) parachute and Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina she has been a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Book preview

XU BING’S FLYING PHOENIXES

in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

I am sixty-four, millions of lives are buttons

on the coats of magnificent birds that arise

from lost memories of building China from

under waves of assaults . . .

           in Beijing, ten years earlier, I wait

with poets and students to walk and speak,

wandering through this language of aging

with Shi Zhi, poet once homeless, now sung

as mythic ancestor of generations in the word.

           These buttons on birds of metal

rising from ashes are lives of men and women

who went into jobs, who never came home,

who came home and died for pipe dreams,

or dreams of a country, the dust bowl lifting

up from starving families in The Grapes of Wrath,

the shuffling armies of black sharecroppers

leaving the South for the North’s harsh ways,

under waves of assaults . . .

           in Kunming I sit in a Muslim restaurant

with a poet who gave me the Koran in Chinese,

while around me folk celebrate the end of a day

of work, sitting in a park, listening to the erhu,

its eloquent moaning where Yu Jian sings about

working in a metal factory, while Wang Xiaoni

worked on a farm later to be the first woman

to write after reeducation . . . what do we know

when we die, when our poetry writes history?

I am nineteen, Three Negro Classics for lunch,

a worker poet in an America where our soldiers

kill our students. We are pilgrims in our souls.

I

WORKERS AND MIRACLES

JOHN HENRY SLEEPING IN HIGH GRASS

Mowers miles away, mud flies on top

his hammer like they own it, his chest

cresting and falling in shapes shifting

between sunlight and leaves, black steel

his destiny, John is motion at rest,

tides of moon and waves in still waters,

suns igniting hearts of molten iron,

a hardened conviction, rose petals in rain.

Sleep is a dream, the real world a poundage,

work a sentence for being his mama’s son,

the hammer in his crib, the supernatural

a drum song of woodpeckers, cow bells

in the field, heaven a home going back to

a place before the bugle call to be born.

WHERE THE STEEL OF PLOUGHS

Is made a frozen custard stand sat

on the way out of the city, Baltimore

shrinking in the rear view mirror

of our ’54 Ford, my mother’s arm

in the window, the air in her hair,

the Irish in her a fire in her eyes.

We made this trip on Sundays,

my father wanting to drive to where

he worked, on this his day off, to see

the victory again, a check each week,

no hot fields down home in old clothes,

his house now brick with a basement,

a lawn, petunias in the backyard,

his children in big city schools.

One summer we all tore up

the front yard to kill the crabgrass,

back again in the feeling of farming,

a grub hoe in my hands, I was like

a man, picking it up and wielding

the thing, John’s hammer against

the mountain one more time,

learning to be a human machine.

In kindergarten my mother turned

to see me following her home, returning,

going back to what I knew, with all its

joy, all its hurt. Leaving universities,

I put my feet on the lawn again,

to kill crabgrass, to study gratitude.

PREACHERS

Worked in the steel mills, black men

from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia,

studying the way God whispered

in the hot air of the coke oven, how

the saints waved the smoke rising

up over Baltimore harbor, a pastiche

announcing the hope of generations.

Slow strides up the aisle to pulpits,

steps learned between rows of peanuts,

corn, tobacco, cotton, rows crossed

over in blood from the thousands sold

down under, raised like sweet calves,

flesh harvested, made righteous by

what fails a people, by what promises.

They built cities on Psalm 139,

calling on the last testing of hearts

of believers so they can lay stones,

one on