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  • Lines on the West Resist Translation, and: To England
  • D. H. Tracy (bio)

Lines on the West Resist Translation

The too-cold-for-swimming Yuba carries once-snow. Unvisited mountains, unvisited sea. We swim.

Swifter than autumn are the river’s attentions.

The locust tree seedpods raft gamely on a journey for which they did not ask.

Had their holidays been instead the Cinco of July and Fourth of Mayo—

still would the blankets settle on the grass, the picnic baskets disgorge

the stuff of their in-itself leisure. It is mine to conveniently omit

all histories under this afternoon, and keen how, how, and how again [End Page 106]

they lived, that something of it carry like the cormorants of my youth

in Arromanches-sur-Mer calling at dawn over the estuaries.

Whereof do they speak who compare that scentless blanched flower to my homeland’s cherry, or permit the trillium the heart-glades betrothed to the filua, these unyearned-for, jezebel springs?

The citizens go about uneasily like a garrison loaned by a foreign court.

Stiff winds have blown them here. It seems any wind could blow them off.

And leave the empty orange cities holding back the dark. With the mere show

of principled tenancy I could be the first patriot. Yet for what dowry? [End Page 107]

To England

To islands and the elements in all their desperation. To lowlands giving on sea-riddled shingles. There is no knowledge in the world for the rain to draw its curtains on. To ancientness, to caprice, to that seething past of no foregone conclusions, after which the one eventuality will be a miracle. To greening and to bloodying. To the ascendance of the ascendant. To the Jutes, to Angles and the Saxon knife-bearers at loggerheads, to the only land there is to dispute, to the embroidered traceries of history where all presence wants its mandate. Hundred-hand horses chalked on the hillsides graze the sparse seasons, standing invisible in the snow, standing stark in the autumns, no giant come yet to break them. And sheepdogs at their long-bred artistry jostle the flocks in the meadows. To the gauge of the yarn. To the teeth on the handsaws. To the sizes of the dowries and the direction of the transaction. To temper, appetite, and taste. To apparent understanding. As if humanity were celestial, the unfolding of events need not suffer anyone to make sense of it. To canals and river-traffic, to wherries, lighters, to brigs, to sea. To dreadnoughts, capital, the dot-dot-dash of the nation’s bidding, to coal-soot camouflaging the moths on the tree-trunks. A Cornish miner upturns his blackened face in the candlelight and unwraps a pasty. The candle becomes carbide, Cornwall becomes California, the carbide becomes an electric lamp, the pasty becomes a pasty. To Quakers in the Delaware Valley. To Virginian Cavaliers, and East Anglians in New Haven who would hang a boy for wanking. [End Page 108]

To the New: York, Hampshire, Jersey, London, England. The bridge is still falling down on playgrounds in Hawaii. The children are still pocketing charms against the plague. Ashes, ashes. To customs’ stunning desertion of their authors. Inheritance is burrs clinging to one’s clothes in the temperate woods of North America. The European beech on the Lexington Green bears upward on its purple boughs the carved pairings of a summer day in alphabet-juju cribbed from the Romans. I in my jotting ape the apers of an out-of-favor scribe posted among the Britons. I in my utterance am your interpreter posted to an inconsequential province like Connecticut. To the Concord Minuteman at the Old North Bridge, never again to put down the plough or musket, prepared for something’s sake to turn against his own, my noble savage, my dying Gaul, steady in his embrace of treason. In Valley Forge hang the smells of typhus, dysentery, and fried dough. At Amritsar the rounds pierced four people at a time, like tines in a jar of olives. To these places, too, if I did not think I hoisted you with your own petard, if my occluded sympathies could tell...

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