Elizabeth Sanger |
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Pastoral I (Techné) Behind the stone wall cloistering a wintering pasture, an old maple blisters vestigial red. Vermilion, multiplicative, erupts. The nag sloughs off a pathetic snow. In the leaf it’s pinnate venation, as with the hand. Our hand. Who knows what ambition withstood your syphilitic drowse toward. A sapling laid in for the truant oratorio in a landscape fundamentally inhabitable to the human form. How else, anyway, could they look. Instead, the escarpment clips the land just beyond the pasture, and past that, through the diffuse afternoon half-light, blockish testament to city and its Industry rises. And what good industry. What good, if one forgets the mouth-work to my business, my kin, if one steadily deliquesces into element most familiar. Whether or not one wills it. * Pastoral (Uncle) I. Sunflowers flourish in uncle’s rich black manure fields after rain. Smells effortless, like carriage, ornate transport I would take through the cow-path, wilding and fern-choked, to the reading we were attending in the resolutely mythical years to come. In other words, Nathan was going to be there, and my sister, and every other symbolic attestation to the value and dignity inherent in all human work. Perhaps more accurately, the narcotic inversion that is dreaming to sleep would end production as such and just produce, and I’d no longer have to imagine you telling me I’ll never have to clean houses again. But don’t we know the nature of uncle’s secret heart? Or how easy this is when addict follows adder’s-tongue in common parlance? It’s no excuse, everyone forbears a childhood. The cringing dog in our dreams, who makes us feel such remorse—what is he doing here? In this place of unimaginable beauty and ease? ** Pastoral (Britney) The Georgia corn snake blondly coils and coils its halcyon forgetting. Scrub pines pirouette past our notice, broadening the field of vision, flaxen grasses abstracting pleasantly in pleasant half-sun. She is here at your behest. Your exotic dancing daydreams—limbs consumed by foreign acreage—American marked or unmarked—fatherly externalities you never inclined to observe— how petty invocations manifest in her tattered lace and temporary studio. Blond enjoys us. Consider it our par-blind and facile grip on light. I want to go back there, submerse in warm opacity, how it cleanses. Just as at any given moment you are with or without a cigarette. Though there may or not be more than two ways to live. |
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