My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 53

This limp and in-betweenness of Legba,
his door tending and dusky mystery,
are qualities essential to the work of
Komunyakaa. In his prose collection,
Blue Notes, Komunyakaa writes about
his poetry process, “Working back
up through the poem, listing all the
possible closures, I search for a little
door I can leave ajar.”
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When I first set out to study, really
study, Komunyakaa’s poems, I thought
I was the only one who had made
this connection between Komunyakaa
and what I’ll call ALegba Poetics —
but then, with research, I came
across Nathaniel Mackay and Keith
Cartwright also reading Komunyakaa
through this Legba lens. And
Komunyakaa’s gorgeous Ploughshares
(spring, 1997) introduction entitled
“Crossroads” where he writes of the
“cult of Legba” and suggests that the
characteristics of Legba (dualism,
shape-changing, navigation through
many worlds at once) strengthen the
creative quest. What I find moving is
that we came to Legba separately —
informed, in my case, by the
language, cosmology, and values of
Komunyakaa’s work.
Legba is helpful when I read
“Requiem,” a poem in which
Komunyakaa responds to the
nightmare both induced and revealed
by Hurricane Katrina. We see the
conjuring of a blurred body — one in
which human anatomy is inextricable
from the land’s. Similarly, the human
condition and history are insinuated
in the description of the Louisiana
landscape. Take this excerpt from the
poem’s beginning, for example:

“search for [the] little door”

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So,
when the strong unholy high winds
whiplashed over the sold-off marshlands
eaten back to a sigh of salt-water,
the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings,
her floating ribs, her spleen & backbone
left trembling in her Old World facades
& postmodern lethargy…