One With Others. C.D. Wright
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receives another river near its mouth
and joins the mighty river to the south of Helena.
Yoncopin are the lilies in the ditches [pretty bloom
for a filthy drainage ditch isn’t it now]. An Arkansas arc
is not a rainbow but an old iron bridge over troubled
brown waters. The cornea’s collection of the earliest
rays ordering an entirely different distribution
of light and shade, I could imagine my friend V:
being blind and seeing everything, marrying a dozen
men and living alone, having seven children and
being barren, toting an M16 that looked
like a hoe, whistling down a taxi in a cold
capital; I could see the faded and ragged fields
replaced by blue shadows on hills of snow or
turning from a stag at the edge of the interstate
into a freshwater pearl before more sediment
entered the river than flowed from its mouth.
[Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a rat snake.]
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Correction Facility Area
No Stopping
Stay Away
Stay Away
Remain Calm
You Watch
How You
Carry Yourself
I Told My Babies
My Beauties
And Don’t You Go
Getting In That Line
Don’t You Dare Go
Getting In That Line
Festina Lente
My Darlings,
Never Waver,
My Dears.
No more than blood:
There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy dark, burning to cross over. Not to become one of the harmed but to shed the skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.
Just to act, was the glorious thing.
And those so grievously harmed, who do the forgiving, do so, that they not be deformed by the lie, must call on reserves not meant to be tapped except for a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, a sudden death or what disclaimers call Acts-of-the-Almighty such as a twister tearing over the land on which a plain frame house stands, or if, in town, it will be of cinderblock, a yard of raked dirt, a stand of day lilies, their withering heads lopped off.
But in this case, the reserves are needed every day, every hour of every day, because the warp is everywhere, because one is supposed to look at one’s reflection and see an inferior, uncomely, unwantable thing, because those are the terms for living, that is the conditioning. It is in fact, the law.
And a most elaborate system has been built up to ensure that the manchild and the womanchild see a lesser face than the one that is there. It requires the long crooked arm of enforcement, the duplication of services and facilities, with one set being far superior to the other set, which of course does not even aim to duplicate, but underscores the shoddiness of the second set of services and facilities, that they be “deservedly,” emphatically unequal.
So, you will find the answers on page 51; though the answers are etched in bloodied ink on paper that has been torn out by your tormentors and dragged into a crawdad hole. Being a measure of society’s distortion, in truth, the answers could have provided little inspiration for the rest of your life. Rather, their absence provides the inspiration, as a pop bottle flies toward a lightbulb and the Savoys commence stomping in the basement.
It also entails the complicity of the leaders of the faithful who are obliged to advance this doctrine as the Word of the Almighty, some of whom probably are believers in this malevolent reading, while others sign on for efficacy’s sake and others by dint of intimidation.
And it enjoins the participation of merchants and professionals, and law enforcers and the extralegal forces of men known as Whitecappers, Night Riders, Klansmen, and Birchers [the latter termed by its local spokesman to be strictly an educational society dedicated to the defeat of communism]; men who openly congregate at a service station owned by the deputy or a city barbershop or outbuilding of a big farm to conspire and collaborate or call themselves Concerned Citizens and so can assemble in public buildings or even the Legion Hut, the swell green slope of which has been used as a setting for a cross in flames, facing the road, you see where I’m coming from, public and semipublic places from which more than half the population is blatantly barred.
DEAR ABBY,
When Daryl and I were first married, he asked me to IRON his undershorts. His mother always did. At first I didn’t mind because we had no children, but now have two, and I could save a lot of time tossing them in the dryer and folding them, but I tried that once and I never heard the end of it. Daryl says he could “feel” the difference. What would you do?
DEAR TOO MUCH IRONING,
I would iron his underwear. You are wasting more energy complaining and arguing than it takes to iron seven pair of shorts once a week.
Everybody has a problem. What’s yours.
+ + +
When I show the granddaughter of my friend’s babysitter a picture of the swimming pool taken when it was built in 1935, printed in a special promotional edition of the paper to entice [white] people to move to the Jewel of the Delta, her eyes flash/ fill/ clear:
We were not allowed to swim there/We had never seen the dressing rooms/ We had never been near the locker room/ We had never seen the lights on their playing field except from the other side of Division.
+ + +
In Big Tree
People are reading their Bibles in bed
Their laces hang by their walking shoes
People are dreaming money semen
And boll weevils on the creep
Some could be soothed by a mourning dove
Some would be soothed by the Prince of Peace
UNDERTAKER: The night a threat wrapped in a brick came through that window, my mother, a mortician herself, said, Girl, forget calling the sheriff. Get the dustpan.
Some people want to lift you up and some are like a crawdad, they just want to drag you down.
[And there are those among the injured who cannot forgive the harm done because they have borne it since they opened their eyes, since the moment their perfectly good-seeing eyes made contact with the delusional eyes of their fellow citizens and lived to see this ignominy passed on; they cannot because the injury is inherently repugnant and because