The Two Standards

COMMENTARY

37 COMMENTARY I. Dark and the days disgrace themselves line up like barefoot sharecroppers for moldy seed take what they can get. What gives them the right to grin without teeth shift legs in the useless southern heat? Who gave them their rusty guns, said: “Shoot anything that moves, wound anything that breathes”? “Gotta eat,” they say, “gotta have some fun.” Dark and the days amass heavy without rain dry heaving day on day. II. This account which logs the disgrace of the dark days in a tone which falters between two hard silences, that which precedes and that next which is inevitable, will help no one. As a record, though, it does succeed with journalistic knack in capturing the workaday of pain. Also the patient detailing of death and death-in-life, is worthy of remark and is achieved with clean integrity. Events are not haphazardly strewn; horrors are linked. Hell is consistently conveyed. It is not, per se, a pinching exposé, though there are moments of titillation which in a work of this kind can’t be avoided. Read it. Read it again. It will take your mind off things twice. 38 III. Dark and the one eyewitness strains across the sand her listless fingers trace. What pattern in the endless grain corresponds to that stunted skeleton? What true word sits in the empty mouth unsaid? Was it something once that moved, was it anything that breathes? What soul survives such a bad embodiment? What work on its first clean page, declares her name? We authors of the dark days provide no dedications. ...