#tyree daye

[goreprofonde]

- Tyree Daye, No Ghost Abandoned.

[headlightsforever]

a turkey vulture lifted from a field I still love. It was hunting season, birds flew off at the sound of rifles, we warred with brown rabbits.

The vulture's head was bald and delicate like the old men's in their hats with names on them like Ford, USA, and Dodgers,

to cover their soft skin, old men who stood in front of the breakfast truck stop across from the field, the butter partly melted

in the middle of the grits, they also saw the vulture, knew how to scavenge, gathered, like horses or stars, in a junkyard looking for a rusted pearl. Those old men have died in their sleep by now, though no field could care how many will fall down in it and why.

I want to sit here tonight still in love and vultureless, listening to Sade. I'm still the boy who walked through a dying sweet-potato field, though our small town wouldn't recognize me now. I have a different body, a dented body, fieldless and far gone.

Tyree Daye, "When I Left" from Cardinal, Copper Canyon Press, 2020.

[iseetheworldinmetaphor]

The Matter of Things, Tyree Daye

“I’m telling you the plain truth. You would think

A town with this many poor folks—

Peeling backyard potatoes was bitter-bathed

But when I got off the pencil-colored bus

My mama was waiting there, laughing with the other mamas,

With a thick piece of maple at her hip

For any carolina dog between here

And where she’d covered my room with a thousand plastic stars”

Reading poetry in the morning feels like prayer.

[godsopenwound]

I knew God was a man / because he put a baby in Mary / without her permission.

— Tyree Daye, from “Neuse River”

[lunchboxpoems]

INHERITANCE

My mother will leave me her mother's deep-black cast-iron skillet someday,                                              I will fry okra in it, weigh my whole life on its black handle, lift it up to feel a people in my hand. I will cook dinner for my mother on her rusting, bleached stove with this oiled star. My mother made her body crooked all her life to afford this little wooden blue house. I want her green thumbs wound around a squash's neck to be wound around my wrist telling me to stay longer. O what she grew with the dust dancing in blue hours. What will happen to her body left in the ground, to the bodies in the street, the uncles turned to ash on the fireplace mantles the cousins we've misplaced? How many people make up this wound? No one taught my mother how to bring us back to life, so no one taught me. O what we gather and O Lord bless what we pass on.

TYREE DAYE

[clatteriing]

when wildness & brown was hit by the car it hollered & spun the wild brown dog looked like a dust devil gathering wind in an empty baseball field   a Carolina Dog in a town of factory workers & missing hands with all its body   it did a small brown dance danced towards its death not a dog anymore i wish i could have stopped to bury it in all its fur on the side of some small road under a moon a without eyes miles away from any smokestack a view of a mountain full of snow a trying mountain that almost made me forget but the dog would not lie down a wild brown dog’s blood is in my mouth   a Carolina Dog & highway vultures at my sides i am an outfield full of wild dancing i got it good in the heart of course the dog became the mountain of course i wake to it

the blue shared earth by Tyree Daye

[lifeinpoetry]

Leaving is necessary some say. There is a whole ocean between you and a home / you can’t fix your tongue to speak.

Tyree Daye, from “Field Notes on Beginning,” published in Poem-a-Day

[ofblackpoetry]

for Aunt Margaret my aunts type amen into comment sections because they have seen God work through even smaller gestures whole kingdoms planted in their backyards who knew a squash could say I love you an ocean’s floor of water will not save her husband’s favorite tomatoes when she picks them she tries not to think of his heart they got their gardens and a tree has never called them nigger

Tyree Daye, Green Thumbed (via Wildness)