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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Inamoratas, with an approbation, <br>Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat <br>Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat<br>And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He waits a moment, he designs his reign, <br>That no performance may be plain or vain. <br>Then rises in a clear delirium.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days. <br>And his desertedness, his intricate fear, the <br>Postponed resentments and the prim precautions.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Now, at his bath, would you deny him lavender <br>Or take away the power of his pine?<br>What smelly substitute, heady as wine,<br>Would you provide? life must be aromatic.<br>There must be scent, somehow there must be some. <br>Would you have flowers in his life? suggest<br>Asters? a Really Good geranium?<br>A white carnation? would you prescribe a Show <br>With the cold lilies, formal chrysanthemum <br>Magnificence, poinsettias, and emphatic <br>Red of prize roses? might his happiest <br>Alternative (you muse) be, after all, <br>A bit of gentle garden in the best<br>Of taste and straight tradition? Maybe so. <br>But you forget, or did you ever know, <br>His heritage of cabbage and pigtails, <br>Old intimacy with alleys, garbage pails,<br>Down in the deep (but always beautiful) South <br>Where roses blush their blithest (it is said) <br>And sweet magnolias put Chanel to shame.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">No! He has not a flower to his name.<br>Except a feather one, for his lapel.<br>Apart from that, if he should think of flowers <br>It is in terms of dandelions or death.<br>Ah, there is little hope. You might as well—<br>Unless you care to set the world a-boil<br>And do a lot of equalizing things,<br>Remove a little ermine, say, from kings,<br>Shake hands with paupers and appoint them men, <br>For instance—certainly you might as well<br>Leave him his lotion, lavender and oil.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Let us proceed. Let us inspect, together <br>With his meticulous and serious love,<br>The innards of this closet. Which is a vault<br>Whose glory is not diamonds, not pearls, <br>Not silver plate with just enough dull shine. <br>But wonder-suits in yellow and in wine, <br>Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt. <br>With shoulder padding that is wide <br>And cocky and determined as his pride; <br>Ballooning pants that taper off to ends <br>Scheduled to choke precisely.<br>   Here are hats <br>Like bright umbrellas; and hysterical ties<br>Like narrow banners for some gathering war.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">People are so in need, in need of help.<br>People want so much that they do not know.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Below the tinkling trade of little coins <br>The gold impulse not possible to show<br>Or spend. Promise piled over and betrayed.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">These kneaded limbs receive the kiss of silk. <br>Then they receive the brave and beautiful <br>Embrace of some of that equivocal wool. <br>He looks into his mirror, loves himself—<br>The neat curve here; the angularity <br>That is appropriate at just its place; <br>The technique of a variegated grace.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Here is all his sculpture and his art <br>And all his architectural design. <br>Perhaps you would prefer to this a fine<br>Value of marble, complicated stone.<br>Would have him think with horror of baroque, <br>Rococo. You forget and you forget.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He dances down the hotel steps that keep <br>Remnants of last night’s high life and distress. <br>As spat-out purchased kisses and spilled beer. <br>He swallows sunshine with a secret yelp. <br>Passes to coffee and a roll or two.<br>Has breakfasted.<br>  Out. Sounds about him smear,<br>Become a unit. He hears and does not hear<br>The alarm clock meddling in somebody’s sleep; <br>Children’s governed Sunday happiness; <br>The dry tone of a plane; a woman’s oath; <br>Consumption’s spiritless expectoration; <br>An indignant robin’s resolute donation <br>Pinching a track through apathy and din; <br>Restaurant vendors weeping; and the L <br>That comes on like a slightly horrible thought.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Pictures, too, as usual, are blurred.<br>He sees and does not see the broken windows <br>Hiding their shame with newsprint; little girl <br>With ribbons decking wornness, little boy <br>Wearing the trousers with the decentest patch, <br>To honor Sunday; women on their way <br>From “service,” temperate holiness arranged <br>Ably on asking faces; men estranged<br>From music and from wonder and from joy<br>But far familiar with the guiding awe<br>Of foodlessness.<br>  He loiters.<br>   Restaurant vendors <br>Weep, or out of them rolls a restless glee.<br>The Lonesome Blues, the Long-lost Blues, I Want A <br>Big Fat Mama. Down these sore avenues<br>Comes no Saint-Saëns, no piquant elusive Grieg, <br>And not Tschaikovsky’s wayward eloquence <br>And not the shapely tender drift of Brahms.<br>But could he love them? Since a man must bring <br>To music what his mother spanked him for<br>When he was two: bits of forgotten hate,<br>Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts: <br>The little dream his father humored: the thing <br>His sister did for money: what he ate<br>For breakfast—and for dinner twenty years<br>Ago last autumn: all his skipped desserts.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The pasts of his ancestors lean against <br>Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity. <br>Hundreds of hungers mingle with his own, <br>Hundreds of voices advise so dexterously <br>He quite considers his reactions his, <br>Judges he walks most powerfully alone, <br>That everything is—simply what it is.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But movie-time approaches, time to boo <br>The hero’s kiss, and boo the heroine <br>Whose ivory and yellow it is sin<br>For his eye to eat of. The Mickey Mouse, <br>However, is for everyone in the house.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Squires his lady to dinner at Joe’s Eats. <br>His lady alters as to leg and eye,<br>Thickness and height, such minor points as these, <br>From Sunday to Sunday. But no matter what <br>Her name or body positively she’s<br>In Queen Lace stockings with ambitious heels </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">That strain to kiss the calves, and vivid shoes <br>Frontless and backless, Chinese fingernails, <br>Earrings, three layers of lipstick, intense hat <br>Dripping with the most voluble of veils. <br>Her affable extremes are like sweet bombs <br>About him, whom no middle grace or good <br>Could gratify. He had no education<br>In quiet arts of compromise. He would<br>Not understand your counsels on control, nor <br>Thank you for your late trouble.<br>   At Joe’s Eats<br>You get your fish or chicken on meat platters. <br>With coleslaw, macaroni, candied sweets, <br>Coffee and apple pie. You go out full.<br>(The end is—isn’t it?—all that really matters.)</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">  And even and intrepid come<br>  The tender boots of night to home.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=402229" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">  Her body is like new brown bread <br>  Under the Woolworth mignonette.<br>  Her body is a honey bowl<br>  Whose waiting honey is deep and hot, <br>  Her body is like summer earth, <br>  Receptive, soft, and absolute ...</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Gwendolyn+Brooks">Gwendolyn Brooks</a></strong></div>