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Motherless Children (Traditional)
- Wayne State University Press
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| 3 2 Motherless Children (Traditional) “motherless children have a hard time crying” Invisible atop the church spire: the rain elided cross the boy in his hand-me-down trenchcoat looks back for one last time, wind on his wet face and high & even in the thick-chested willows, wind her last words whispered and carried like a coin a pocketful of years will rub smooth, and what can he buy with it now? old snow? dust from a gypsy moth’s wings, a cricket swaddled in wolfspider web. Her face by now unseeable: eighteen years. And he can’t even let a moose crossing the thin August river be a moose, wants it to stand for something else—for what?, some leech-laden passage between this world and that was what she whispered, ultimately, that the unforgivable is to forget that you are here. So don’t: this comes back, entering a box canyon recognizable only by cliff-shade filling it in the exact moment when the fisherman, parched, bonetired, arrives, and knows where he is. Late-shine, the day tendered. Caddis ovipositing on the shallow pool he kneels in (mascara around her eyes like they’d rubbed fluttering wings | 3 3 across her skin) cups hands to drink from. And who stares up from his reflection, whose face is it, anyway, falling through his fingers. ...