Untitled Blues

   after a photography by Yevgeni Yevtushenko

                                By Yusef Komunyakaa

I catch myself trying

to look into the eyes

of the photo, at a black boy

behind a laughing white mask

he's painted on. I

could've been that boy

years ago.

Sure, I could say

everything's copacetic,

listen to a Buddy Bolden's cornet

cry from one of those coffin-

shaped houses called

shotgun. We could

meet in Storyville,

famous for quadroons,

with drunks discussing God

around a honky-tonk piano.

We could pretend we can't

see the kitchen help

under a cloud of steam.

Other lurid snow jobs:

night & day, the city

clothed in her see-through

French lace, as pigeons

coo like a beggar chorus

among makeshift studios

on wheels--Vieux Carre

belles having portraits painted

twenty years younger.

We could have jive

down on Bourbon & Conti

where tap dancers hold

to their last steps,

mammy dolls frozen

in glass cages. The boy

locked inside your camera,

perhaps he's lucky--

he knows how to steal

laughs in  a place

where your skin

is your passport.

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