If One of Us Should Fall

Westward, Expanded Definition

26 westward, expanded defInItIOn 1. [phenomenon] The redacted “unreasonable.” The manner in which eyebrows vault skyward in disbelief, or in which a knife cleanly slid over flesh becomes tart, uncomplicated language; the sweep of shoreline in repose, a face over coffee or open ocean dreaming in sifted gold. Any shoreline. Any dark interior. Landscape rich with the suggestion of further sky and highways welting vast stretches of wilderness. The price of passage. The hunger to go. 2. [phenomenon] Gangster syndicate with Queen’s orders, fluent pox like English. The cavalcade movement of men, women and children upon the shores and fanning out. The God upon their tongue a lead bullet, a fever, a willfully dismantled village, people, tradition, language or landscape. 3. [direction] Sunset driven into, minivan with socks; unshaven sleepiness and the narrow sprawl of club dates from coast to coast, series of sad motels in pastel disrepair, handfuls of telephone quarters, guitars that call us by the names our mothers gave, the body as cathedral of many chambered noise 4. [symbol] Covered wagon. Puritan cornucopia of savage fruit and gizzards, full-throttle stallions lathered toward El Dorado. Horizon overbrimming velvet saloon bustier and dust covered whiskey tin. Plague of little post-prairie prairie houses. Compulsory Carolina exodus parade from mangrove to dustbowl. Compulsory school bus echo. The whitewater river running through it. Klan hand-blasted visage of four dead presidents in the mountains of promised land. 5. [phenomenon] The production of ghosted landscape, the shackle music and weight upon bones, the sick pitch of the full-bellied 27 boat; God of speed toward another coast, a place more closely resembling the end of the world. 6. [phenomenon] Restlessness of spirit. Open sky opening. Land far and beyond the proportion of personal otherhood. Orchestration without time signature. Towns shunk down to past tense on the horizon. Hysteria dressed in the flames of dying maple and momentum , strings vibrating against a landscape without buffalo, red wolf, short-necked Chicksaw ponies, bees, barley. It is a big sound, the heart tumbling around cold water tenements and canyons , the rusted-down bottling plant, fallow malls, sleepy costal towns after the seasonal parade of detritus and corn dogs, the thoroughfare abandoned, fewer daylight hours lapping against night. 7. [phenomenon] Tripping. Police on the highway flagging down the suspicious. Convenient and aggressively vague definition of suspicious. A prison sentence without charge, without trial, without term. A habit of disappearing all squeaky wheels, encouragement toward silence. Offering a mutable dictionary. A night seared by sirens, a moment shrunken to a noose. A voice that replaces one’s own, and stepping from the crushed throat into bright air, strains its verbs against 20 uniformed bodies of Hell no. 8. [phenomenon] The making of exquisite noise. The survival of genius. Genius transmission via underlanguage, overtongue, intersong, transhamonic polymorphorhythm, visual drumbeat, quilted scrapings, adornment, basket grass, indigo stained palm, spice, hidden alphabet, dance, constant agitation, sweet hurricane of song. 28 9. [location] Geographical location famous for promise of gold. A direction less than one hundred years from where young girls stand in dresses the color of faded everything, bonnets and skirts, like bells filled with wind. Fields that become dustbin to bigger ideas, squat towns thrown like a poker dice, space between them scarred with rails. The unmarked grave and pogrom latitude. Territory upon which whole towns were swallowed by fire. Where men shoot at bison from the windows of passing trains, the place where they fall and fall. 10. [interrogative] The multiplicity of questions. Can you? Jag a little music there; make it all the way to ocean. Move steadily without expanding with possession; without becoming full as a tick; a hide wasted in prairie wheat, swollen cumulous of flies. Can you read the winds and their constant shifting. Learn the ghosts in every landscape. Remember their names. Know where you are. ...