James Emory Black of West Union

ames Emory Black of West Union after a story told by Mike Hens?? I wallow in this Brush Creek rushing, come to my feelings again, hailing the brilliant bits of rainwash slewing by. I know the aspen leaf and cedar trunk that bumps then lodges in my skull, attempting fossils or at least an imprint in my mud. When I was drier, baking in the earth-oven of my pale, exhausted acres, I was sad to hear the cries of hound-pups sucked down steady to the bottoms of these pools. No more: they keep me bestial company, muzzling at the feet of faint, city fishers, as I rise in secret and surround them. And I grow greater, deeper, swifter. All my local blindness has at last been washed away: now I know who hacked me into pieces for one hundred dollars of my money, spread my limbs along a misty fifty yards of shore, 38 then quickly burned my house. I know him, still repairing cars a mile from Beasley Forks, with fox-skins nailed to trees behind him, watching. All my hours out here in the riffles I have sung, lower than the breeze, the strength to his disease. He roars around this county in a car, shotgun glinting from the window, all the widows nodding as he passes by, knowing bell, book, or candle, nothing saves him as he sweeps the washed-out roads watching for my pieces. Here a finger, there a leg, there, out of reach, my cataracted eye. I fade into the farmland's dye, camouflage of potash and manure, sure of nothing but the coaltrain's thunder past his cabin, his dream-torn nights, the sour smell of dogs and ash I've wished upon his years. —Richard Hague 39 ...