Abide

Letter from Okemah

46 Letter from Okemah . . . this is the reckoning I claim . . . —Terrance Hayes A photograph let hang a century, Oklahoma fades into Oklahoma, the road ahead, the whole horizon beaten to a brass forever soon we’ll rapture up, curving almost noticeably, to melt into that metal. The next word we see should be the name of God, but Okemah’s just another town, two miles closer to the sun. I know this name, inked on a photograph as brown and bright as afternoon and again and again on postcards and in your poem which says itself to me. If I close my eyes I can see it, the Canadian River, five miles west. I can see her, print dress over the water, Laura Nelson, feet floating free. And if I look at her, then look away, if I say the name the picture has erased 47 and do not look at the locals or the bridge where light has knit the rope into the sun and do not turn to see her son, half naked, Lawrence, on the line, I can see her flying from the water into indefinite afternoon. But I see them, I see them all, and cannot look away. They’re all there, the photograph hung over its place in the air rippling in the heat as in the bath where the page first learned it, water I want to break to steal the light that burns her there, her son’s light, too, and leave the townsfolk where their gaze can dry the river to a trace, in a bright that will not blink until they’re burnt back to salt, to terror’s silk, to paper. But that time has become a place light cannot move. Okemah means things up high. Say it, and the bridge is there, the town, the cottonwoods, the frame in a faded parlor that holds this scene, the curtains moths have laced, tassels waiting for latent hands, 48 the sound horn of the gramophone where I hinge the needle into the groove of a hundred years’ sound and finger the platen’s edge and pull it back until the horn is gasping, until the sound’s gone out of everything and the wind is coming in. ...