By Tim Seibles

Just whistling at white legs once
upon a time, could get a black man
torn apart by some giddy mob tipsy
with their fair skin and cold beer—
and there’d be picnics while he swung
and some singing in the round.

But back then is not now, and the future
is a ditty I hum to myself the way
a child might whistle Dixie just to keep
from hearing what teethes in the dark,
and for most of my life, I have lived there:
belonging and not belonging to America—

this fat animal shape on the globe
where white people have done so much
to so many and get “pretty tired
of hearing about it.” I’m not
trying to be mean. I’ve got
some white blood in my veins—

and really, whiteness is just a shadow

of its former self, but still, I’m kinda
scared, confused about what to do
with History while I’m sitting in a park
in Virginia holding a white woman’s hand.
I never want to think being American
is impossible, but the truth is

some silly mothafuckas still fly
Confederate flags and maybe it’s all
too much for any one man. I would like
to say she smiles a smile that locks
the door on grief, that her legs
could make a new priest pause, that

what is unsaid—in the meeting
of our complicated skins—is itself
a word: felt but never defined
exactly like Time, the way it
shoves everybody forward, then
leaves all of us way behind.

I remember kissing Karen Stickney
in kidneygarden, her hair vaselined and wavy,
her buttery brown cheek damp against my lips
how, for the rest of the day, my little brain whistled
like a whiffle ball, though the teacher did make me
stay after school. I told Karen I would save her
if she fell down a hill—and I meant it,

as much as a five-year-old can. Now, fifty years
deep into this, that’s mostly what I’m looking for:
a touch of daylight with someone who can turn me
away from the tilt of my own nervous humming.

But what can I say to the black woman
who gives me that hard stare, who cannot hear
my heart crooning, Of course, I love sistas,
but isn’t everybody beautiful?
In so many ways, the blood is still wet
on the lash and I see black bodies

everyday pressed into capital—army, navy,
NBA, NFL—and who gets to live inside them
lovely new prisons? It must be a riddle
being white, knowing and not knowing what’s
what: afraid of the dark citizens but so in love
with that funky music. Even this

slyly freckled woman who squeezes my hand,
whose white skin hides her own hard story,
breathes an air I can’t quite fit into my lungs,
though we groove to Parliament
and she throws her hips hard enough
to shake the centuries loose.

I want to believe love can be big enough
to beat back all the bad news, and today,
I don’t think I do, but maybe I think too much,

and a touch of lips is bigger than History,
and where I am, this present tense, is just a song
that’s really over by the time it begins.