17 pages • 34 minutes read

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight ...”]

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Hayes includes Wanda Coleman’s definition of an American sonnet in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, acknowledging her form as a model. Coleman’s and Hayes’s American sonnets maintain the standard 14 lines of traditional sonnets, but use internal rhyme and alliteration rather than end rhymes to knit together the poem’s music: Coleman related her sonnets to jazz improvisation. In “Probably twilight…,” Hayes avoids typical end rhymes, in favor of repeating end words: “happened” or “happens” ends lines 4, 6, and 7, while “encounters” ends 2 and 9. Lines 3 and 8 end rhyme with “say” and “day.” Lines 11-13 end in assonance and repetition: “blackness” repeats bl, k, and s sounds in “dark blue skin.”

Hayes’s American sonnet makes strong use of the traditional sonnet's volta, or abrupt shift in meaning or perspective after the first eight lines. In “Probably twilight...,” in line 9 Hayes’s speaker turns more directly to the audience—the reader or the assassin—for the last six lines, the sestet.

Alliteration and Internal Rhyme

Hayes creates an effect like jazz improvisation through repeated sounds, percussive alliteration, and mirrored accent patterns. Form reflects content, as the echoes between the unstressed syllables in lines 1 and 2 constitute an effect softer even than feminine rhyme in “blackness dangerous / Darkness,” a phrase conveying an undercurrent of hidden peril. The term “existential jambalaya” (Line 3), two four-syllable words with the same accent pattern, repeats acoustically in the next line. The sentence “The names alive are like the names / In graves” sets up a pattern of long a and long i assonance (names, alive, like, names, graves), interweaving the v and l sounds. This intricate, interlocking texture mimics the path of assassin and prey. The poem closes with incantatory cross alliteration in lines 13 and 14: “black" and "dark blue skin,” “man" and "matches,” and “way one twilight.”

Simile and metaphor

A literal and metaphoric question runs through Hayes’s collection. The poet questions his ability to write a poem for his assassin, wondering if it's possible to make art for the force that desires your annihilation—whether that force comes in the form of a human, individual assassin or in the form of a culture that denies Black existence, erasure threatens his identity.

This poem’s metaphors work on multiple levels with more than one meaning. In the first lines, “twilight makes blackness dangerous / Darkness” (Lines 1-2) because dimmed light limits vision and judgment, but also because uncertain spaces limit empathy and connection. The speaker compares his interactions to “jambalaya” (Line 3), choosing a dish with a mixed cultural identity, but also one improvised from necessity. When the speaker says the “names alive are like the names / In graves” (Lines 10-11), the comparison functions as a literal one and as a simile: To strangers, the names of the living sound like the names of the dead, but to the speaker, the living names are marked for death, as if they are already in graves. The final extended simile connects generations with a time of day metaphor, skin hue matching skin hue like the dusk sky of one evening corresponds with another. This comparison suggests a kind of immortality alongside the omnipresent threat of assassination.