I'm watching MTV, reading this little strip
running across the bottom saying,
MC HAMMER… SUNDOME…MC HAMMER…
but before it can come around again
I'm hustling through the door of the Sundome
and then I’m staring down at
four young black singers
slowly exploding out of their bodies,
Troop, the black girl next to me says to me
by way of explanation, and I'm remembering
the concerts I went to as a kid, how dazzling
the black groups were, how I'd never seen anything
like them, the voices, and those spare, beautiful moves
that made my vertebrae float, how I wanted to reach out,
become them, but this is different, this is black on black,
the kind of communion that makes everything
stop, swell to one breath, like it's doing now,
and then Troop is suddenly gone
and the house lights come on and then
they go off again and there's this beautiful roar,
After Seven, the same black girl says,
as if she were naming another bend in a river
she knows like no other, because this is
the beautiful river, this is the one you steal for,
get beaten for, called Nigger for,
this is the river you die for.