Malcolm X Transcribing the Dictionary in Slow Motion
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The dictionary contains the only sentence that never ends And for you Malcolm I offer one that does But takes its time and catches its breath stretching Its lines as far as the margin that is the end Of the world and so begins again knowing How the beginning is the end that waits blankly Knowing it can never be shaken delayed The All-Knowing End of Things Where the soul comes from toward where it returns The beginning again because you don’t know Which words you need to learn You take your time and you do your time You live your sentence and you live your sentence out Clear your throat and lick the pencil’s tip Turn the page and fill your tablets up and by ten p.m. each night [End Page 1126] You rage against the dying lights Turn inward the closest kind of reading Where words are empty and real But only at the end as the sun rises and the moon fades And sparrows bathe in a puddle of dust Because they must because it feels just So [End Page 1127]
Alexander Long is author of Vigil and co-editor of A Condition of the Spirit: The Life & Work of Larry Levis. His work has also appeared in The Southern Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, American Writers (Scribner’s Sons), Blackbird, and Third Coast. He is an assistant professor of English at John Jay College in New York.
