a
But Time is not content with a single universe.
Lateesha Washington, Darla Hamrick’s classmate,
is building another, with no father
wearing an orange tie, no purple dog,
but blaring streets and gritty alleyways,
a little park with cops and children
and a Jungle Gym big as a tenement,
and adults doing kiddy things, tattooing
their veins all black and playing with guns.
Oh my, see that one couple,
how involved in public daylight.
Lateesha demolishes her gray Crayola coloring
the endless street and so must make her skyline pink.
The compromise distresses her.
Lateesha does not believe in purple dogs
or pink skylines or scarlet houses.
What she sees she wants her crayon to draw,
what she sees she wants Mrs. Goetz to see,
for if her teacher cannot see her world
she cannot see Lateesha,
who desires today to be a little understood.
She cannot think her friend will understand.
Just look at Darla’s world,
a purple pet, a family that never changes personnel,
no streets that lead to other people,
and no buildings to lock away the sun,
no gold-tooth uncles who come by at night.
One eye can see the sum of Darla’s world;
Lateesha’s universe requires more eyes than one.
b
From what coign, Observer, would you look down
To find amid our rubble and our anger,
Amid the cryptic cozenings of danger,
A pattern to base your granted conclusions on?
Midnight and morning ignite the tinder town
With familiar passions and the vaulting clangor
Of neon steel, as stranger upon stranger
Jostle beneath the towers of indifferent stone;
Hustle and hurtle forward, seeing unseen,
Unseeing unseen, knowing without knowing
How the current courses them along,
Going somewhere without actually going,
Having been somewhere without having been.
One of the throng, you cannot know the throng.
c
And yet the world-views Darla and Teesha hold
However far apart, cause no apparent schism;
The girls make pictures, not debates, though
Now and again one will point and giggle.
No one can see what universe inhabits
The mind of someone else, whether friend or other,
Until an artwork shows the difference
Image and color and shape have made there.
Lateesha knows much Darla will never know,
And Darla knows worlds Teesha can hardly dream,
Yet still their friendship flourishes, and
Darla and Teesha together are one world.
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