“What I Might Sing”

Last Friday, I was thinking of Whitney Houston,

and, because of you, I was thinking too of America,

what I might sing of it. In elementary school,

I pledged allegiance, the opening words

still the fastest way for me to find my right hand,

for my right hand to find my heart. I struggled

to say indivisible —not individual or invisible but

the opposite of both. Over thirty years ago

in my home town, when I was a child

in elementary school, faithful in my recitation

to the flag, the L.A.P.D. pounded into a man’s body

on the side of the freeway, caught on tape,

the camera candid, the verdict not guilty,

my neighborhood ablaze, the smoke visible

from the kitchen window and on TV.

They peeled open, too, the loose fist

of my family: my father and uncle and uncle

and my aunt’