Oh, I’ll make a book for you, I said
Oh, I’ll make a book
Your hand will direct
your dreams without age
will settle the heart—
transposed
i’ve walked where you walked, slept
slept where you slept, the living whole
moves in my heavy remembrance, child
whose living ways
you swept
all fear from
an exactitude:
essentials i could absorb, being a girl,
that were more important for that
simplification! From math to
the solitary—
singleness of mind (that no one can erase)
Now do it, he said . . . and he lay on the ground
crying. Go to that place! the garden of
human discovery
and the closed gate
the rivers held his
image in water
the mountains held a boundless search—
and books
closed about the mind
and opened the heart
never to close from feeling or another’s
distress. He filled the great bucket
in one last movement, a death of tears . . .
a race
racial heritage
held at last only in remembrance
as the firing came
and the dying old said to the young,
children to children
as the great white guns shattered
Remember . . . Re-member
the earth of our feet
enriches the ground
and our dust blows in the wind,
in the wind
——
what will come from it i do not know. Simply, it will be my tribute to him, and to my mother . . . and I’ll write it my way
it was all after the Civil War, when even the land had been ravished—cemetery to Dead soldiers in Vicksburg (all from the North) . . . our own dead rotting where they lay (i suppose) in bayou country
the City of U. Could it be Copan? I’ve looked for it and looked for it. Only similarity is . . . on the mountain there is a frog. I didn’t go up to see it
he was on a search, setting out mahogany
——
He went south the same way that Franz Blom went to Chiapas, from New Orleans, from a university in New Orleans . . . and Blom stayed there
a ravaged human heart—
he still dreamed of it in the Nursing Home. Mama would wake, hearing him (in sleep) speaking Meskito Indian, the language— back in sleep in a terrain that had marked him, marked the mind . . . where people in my time even, a black race, could walk with distinction
i loved it as he did, and it opened my heart. May the god of Esquipulus help me to do it
besmilr