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fairchild61 B. H. Fairchild The Limits of My Language "Nouns normally serve to identify things in space, verbs to release them in time." "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." -John Felstein Ludwig Wittgenstein The black shawl falls from your shoulders as you rise against your daughter's tugs and whispers, and your withered mouth opens to a dry quaver like voices heard across a windblown field, A mighty fortress is our God, and my students wake to listen. On that first day she whispered, warning me: SAe thinks she's in church. She's my mother and I'll have to bring her every day. Your eyes wandered like fish behind a glass and your crooked hand jerked back from mine. So I've become a minister to you, some fundamental backwoods screamer, redeemer of Oklahoma souls, surrounded by a choir of distant kin-folk robed in flecks of stained-glass light and shade. The Old Rugged Cross or Bringing in the Sheaves lifts you right out of your seat at times and we wait while your daughter puts you back in place: Be quiet now, Momma. There's no time for that. In her voice I hear your own among hymns hovering inside a white frame church one Sunday morning years ago Rock ofAges, cleft for me and in your shaken glance and palsied hands I see you kneeling there beneath dim memories of burnt-out fields and black locust clouds looming down 62 the minnesota review wailing with God's own sorrow let me hide myself in thee creek floods crawling across gray moonlit ground, black hours in storm cellars between dank earth walls let the water and the blood your mother crying the same hymns hanging in the air like dust as you knelt there that Sunday in your virginity and white eyelet, clump of cinquefoil in your fist from thy riven side which flowed as the preacher man laid hands on your and promised everything: And so, through a dustbowl girlhood, a husband headed for hell, and one daughter who turned out right, you saved your best for last. Now you come into my room and take your place and stare into some space beyond these walls. Every time I take a stick of chalk, you see the wafer in my hand. Every time I write a word across the board, you see me beckon to the choir. Every time I ask is this a verb or noun, you turn the pages of your book. And when I spread my arms for answers, you rise slowly to sing, Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, out of time and place. ...

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