Morning in the mountains. I am going down home
early. The road empty, wide, smooth as my hand.
Sun streams heavy bays of light. If I could remember one
use of beauty, the persistent type, on whole unhuman,
so
Features
In our green Plymouth station wagon, we crisscrossed the map. My mother let me choose our destinations. “Any state but Georgia” was Eve’s rule, though I still memorized the Georgia motto: Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.
Her other rule: we couldn’t stay …
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So you will never find me—
In this life—with a sharp and invisible
Fence, I encircle myself
With honeysuckle, bind myself,
With hoarfrost, cover myself.
So you will never hear me
At night—with a crone’s subtlety:
With
We do not recognize the body
Of Emmett Till. We do not know
The boy’s name nor the sound
Of his mother wailing. We have
Never heard a mother wailing.
We do not know the history
Of ourselves in
Enter the Valley of Knowledge,
with its boundless myriad roads
unfurling in every direction.
Here, no path resembles the next.
Here, the traveler of the body is different
from the traveler of the soul.
Here, both body and
If the Pyramid at Giza were
at Bleecker and LaGuardia,
the base would extend down to West Broadway
and Spring, and across Spring to Mercer,
and up Mercer to Bleecker and across
Bleecker to LaGuardia,
sloping up on four
The room in which I start sobbing again and wonder
if my sobs will hurt the baby inside me, and the room
in which I hope so, a room made entirely of a window.
The room of my husband’s goodnight,
Boone’s genius was to recognize the difficulty as neither material nor political but one purely moral and aesthetic.
—William Carlos Williams,
“The Discovery of Kentucky”
Narrator is unmanageable. Demonstrates a disregard for form bordering on the paranoid. Questioned closely, he …
Read MoreIt is black. Black and rearing up; rounded points, pointy points. Black and matted together; plates and plains, lines and radiant circles. Black on black. Black on black on black.
____
Is this a mountain? Mountains? Is this the ocean—all …
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