Weekly Poem: 'Root'

**By Terrance Hayes** My parents would have had me believe there was no such thing as race there in the wild backyard, our knees black with store-bought grass and dirt, black as the soil of pastures or of orchards grown above graves. We clawed free the stones and filled their beds with soil and covered the soil with sod as if we owned the earth. We worked into the edge of darkness and rose in the edge of darkness until everything came from the dirt. We clawed free the moss and brambles, the colonies of crab-weed, the thorns patrolling stems and I liked it then: the mute duty that tightened my parents' backs as if they meant to work the devil from his den. Rock and spore and scraps of leaf; wild bouquets withered in bags by the road, cast from the ground we broke. We scrubbed the patio, we raked the cross hatch of pine needles, we soaked the ant-cathedrals in gas. I found an axe blade beneath an untamed hedge, its edge too dull to sever vine and half expected to find a jawbone scabbed with mud, because no one told me what happened to the whites who'd owned the house. No one spoke of the color that curled around our tools or of the neighbors who knew our name before we knew theirs. Sometimes they were almost visible, clean as fence posts in porch light; their houses burning with wonder, their hammocks drunk with wind. When I dreamed, I dreamed of them and believed they dreamed of us and believed we were made of dirt or shadows: something not held or given, irredeemable, inexact, all of us asking what it means to be black... I have never wanted another life, but I know the story of pursuit: the dream of a gate standing open, a grill and folding chairs, a new yard boxed in light.       "Terrance Hayes":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/profiles/poet_hayes.html is the author of three books of poems: "Muscular Music" (1999); "Hip Logic" (2002, National Poetry Series winner); and "Wind in a Box" (2006), and the recipient of many awards, including a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Hayes is a professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pa., with his family.