Full Foreground

Flatlands

21 Flatlands The distinctive sign of nineteenth-century urbanism was the boulevard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces together; the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism has been the highway, a means of putting them asunder. —Marshall Berman Given a body called the instant—and it’s sprawling: inside a prison house of vacant signs and overgrown environs grim existence against the unimaginable November light Memphis rose of it brown behind sunset cloudforms the rain occasional edge of the Mississippi River steel stretched green-gold to an Arkansas sun fading into shifts of cityscape flannel chills and on what side of the train tracks where they now ban the practice, the city having settled with relatives of Adam Pollow, a University of Memphis student who, four years prior, fell victim to a hog-tie by officers of the peace—allegedly, else liable —as he was belted with a night stick shoved into the back of a squad car, hands and legs now bound behind his back a trussed animal rushed to the ward where he’s choking on vomit or vacant signs overgrown environs 22 Temple in pentecostal elegance of dress walk worthy of Enoch touching thousands through house-to-house prayer, feeding the hungry, healing the wounded, clothing the naked, building the kingdom, not only the word but the enterprise of the saints into the highways and hedges, highways and hedges where I can rightly say I have experience, making presence known, which action of the Holy Ghost idera espetani rereson and onto the empty lot of the drive-in along U.S. 61 on the outskirts of Memphis, sand-colored pavement and the half-moons drawn by speaker poles in rows concentric with desolation’s scribble of blackbird swarm behind the blank screen translucent dreary overcast and lulled by the lapping of the wind and the onrush of cars down the highway, thoughts of speed and abandon, of pine trees holding back the bluff and slope to honeyed voices from a picture show once in desire and immanence: shall we gather at a grandeur hushed by degradation and pointlessness at odds with each other in the desolate stretches of this smoldering kingdom devoid of 23 well, except for the low, poorly drained strip of land along the Gulf, the place rolling and fertile, the delta a broad flat region planted in soybeans and cotton from Woodall Mountain to the Gulf of Mexico, the point being where exactly in 1541 near Sunflower Landing Hernando de Soto saw the Great River 24 HOUSE TONGUE TRACK ...