In the Language of My Captor
IN THE LANGUAGE OF MY CAPTOR
SHANE McCRAE
Wesleyan University Press
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Wesleyan Poetry
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2017 Shane McCrae
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Quemadura
Typeset in DIN and Scala
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCrae, Shane, 1975– author.
Title: In the language of my captor / Shane McCrae.
Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2017] | Series: Wesleyan poetry
Identifiers: LCCN 2016035696 (print) | LCCN 2016041724 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577115 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780819577139 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3613.C385747 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3613.C385747 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035696
5 4 3 2 1
Cover photo: Bradley Theodore, Young President 2015.
For my families
You will feed yourself five thousand times. —THYLIAS MOSS
Contents
| 1 | |
| His God | 3 |
| Panopticon | 5 |
| Privacy | 6 |
| What Do You Know About Shame | 8 |
| Privacy 2 | 11 |
| In the Language | 13 |
| 2 | |
| Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons | 17 |
| 3 | |
| Banjo Yes Receives a Lifetime Achievement Award | 55 |
| Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies | 58 |
| Banjo Yes Talks About His First White Wife | 60 |
| Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park | 61 |
| Banjo Yes Talks About Motivation | 63 |
| Banjo Yes Asks a Journalist | 65 |
| 4 | |
| (hope)(lessness) | 69 |
| Sunlight | 72 |
| Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War | 77 |
| Asked About The Banjo Man and Its Sequels Banjo Yes Tells a Journalist Something About Himself | 78 |
| Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man’s Face | 82 |
| Acknowledgments | 85 |
1
His God
I am the keeper tells
Me the most popular exhibit
You might not think this cheers me but it does
I’m given many opportunities
I like especially to ask the groups
Led by fat white men I am careful to
Never address the fat man but the group
How has it come // To pass
that I’m on this side of the bars
And you’re on that side
And Who stands in your shoes
You or the people you resemble
they don’t give me shoes // I say
Gesturing toward a zoo employee
and I smile
Often the people do not answer me
Often the fat man squints and says It real- // ly makes you think
Something like that or There
but for the grace of God / I tell the keeper they must be
The daughters and the sons of nearer gods
I tell him my gods had to stay behind
To watch my people / He likes it when I talk like that
the truth is I don’t know
The keeper when he’s drunk
Sometimes he says I’m lucky
To have been rescued from my gods
And I should thank the man who bought me
I used to laugh at him but now I grieve
I think // His god is not a god like mine / His god
Is not a mother not a father
not a hunter not a farmer
his / God is a stranger
from no country he has seen
Panopticon
The keeper put me in the cage with the monkeys
Because I asked to be
Put in the cage with the monkeys
Most of the papers say the monkeys
must // Remind me of my family
The liberal papers say the monkeys must
Remind me of my home
The papers don’t ask me
some days // I tuck notes explanations
Into soft monkey shits
and call white children to the bars
I warn the parents / But still they let their children come
And that’s my explanation / I am
their honest mirror
I say Whether you’re here
to