Abide

Mayflower

17 Mayflower For John Earl Reese, a sixteen-year-old, shot by Klansmen through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas, where he was dancing, October 22, 1955 Before the bird’s song you hear its quiet which becomes part of the song and lives on after, struck notes bright in silence as the room’s damp— wallpaper and wall muffling the high cicadas’ whine, mumbling talk from another room— hangs like the thought of a roof in the midst of rain long after the joists have been brought down. So the quiet syllables crowded full throats once the talkers 18 have gone away, and a young man’s voice becomes a young man’s silence, all he did not say, which nothing keeps saying in the empty room between the pines that hold the quiet of the song he cannot sing, the sound of a room without sound in the middle of what anyone can hear. ...