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By Rita Dove
Sunday, August 13, 2000; Page X12

Most Way Home, Kevin Young's first volume of poetry (chosen by Lucille Clifton as a National Poetry Series selection in 1995), is a tribute to a time not long ago in America, when the work of a summer's day--washing and cleaning and cooking--was accomplished without benefit of air conditioners to stave off the heat. In African-American communities in particular, people would take to the streets when indoor living conditions became too oppressive. Finally, however, evening arrived with its marginal relief. Ah, sleeping with open windows . . . how long since I've even considered it? Kevin Young's poem--dedicated to a visual artist--sets me to wondering just how much pleasure, what symphony of sounds and smells, I seal off on a summer night.

Whatever You Want

for Arnold Kemp

This could be a good day. It starts
without you, as usual; you haven't seen
dawn in years. By noon it hits half-
boiling & the air breaks down. After lunch
even the fans turn lazy, not moving you
or wind. Is it the Negro in you that gets
in the car & just starts driving, keeps
the windows down, your music
bouncing off station wagons, power
windows? Whatever you want

to call it, it makes you feel you own
everything, even the creeping heat. Spin
the radio looking for summer, for love
songs with someone somewhere worse
off than you. Why doesn't anyone
advertise for rain? Instead the personalities
keep talking to prove they are indoors,
cool. By seven the temperature outsails
the price of gas, the movies are all sold out
& you can't get cool for the heavens.

So peel away, head for the edge
of town where the roads turn thin & alone,
speeding to prove you can summon death
like tortoises cracked open in the road
up ahead, the water stored in their shells
running free. Keep on trying to out-race
heat's red siren until radio sings out

Come home, come on home black boy
to your chimney full of birds, to this house
of flame. Evening, the heat holds you
with its aching, unavoidable fingers;
you sleep naked, dreamless to heat.
Windows thrown open as mouths, fan on,
it still feels like a ghost is baking sweet
potato pies through the night. Your favorite.

This second poem from Most Way Home is part of a long sequence called "Saying Grace." The narrator is a woman, and her childhood recollections--rolling lemons to release their juice, the sweating pitchers of Kool-Aid, the incomprehensible death of a playmate--are related in her own unique Southern idiom:

The Quench

Thirst kept with us all
year. Yellow
hands rolled till soft
enough for lemonade, pulp
mixed with sugar
to stop us from wincing.

Water then was clean
as Fifth Sunday sermon.

We weren't the Nehi family
that Frankie's was, heavy
bottles of Coke & orange
nosing against each other
in her icebox, glass pressed
like noses at toyshop
windows. Such swallowed
luxury, small as it was, never got

opened for guests. Guess
that made me kin, her cola brown
flowing in my blood too. Cherry,
grape, my house swam mostly
in Kool-Aid, red staining
on our mouths like play
draculas often enough
I don't much
care for it now.

Nickel a packet, six
for a quarter, each flavor

made two honest quarts. Enough
to fill us children with silence
long after the wake, well
past the summer Frankie fell
down the well & stayed
there, soaking up that clear,
careless sky.

("Whatever You Want" and "The Quench" reprinted with permission from "Most Way Home." Copyright {copy} 1995 by Kevin Young. Zoland Books, Cambridge, Mass.)