- A Spectacular Reformation of Their Old Ways
They’ve gone down to Honey Grove, are living in an abandoned house. One of them’s strung up a wire
spliced into the electric line, and the lights flicker all night like heat lightning, like angels
playing a trick. They have a few plates, drink from mason jar mugs, it’s not for long, they know,
but this is downright civilized: breakfast at a table with a bedsheet for tablecloth, a spectacular reformation
of their old ways. On the falling-in porch with moth-shadows swimming on their faces
they wonder aloud what happened to the old white man at the Salvation Army lunch up in Idaho
who could speak to space aliens. He stayed on Blackfoot land, but spent the week in town
begging day-old pastries from bakeries to dole out to the dentists who’d pro bonoed
his gold teeth inlaid with rubies. He’d told them, Why didn’t they settle down, get jobs at Walmart,
start a family? Here’s as nice a place as any, he’d said, handing them a sheaf of newspaper
clippings, documents of his fame and fortune. They’d hung around the library all day
chasing off patrons with their unlaced shoes souring the air, slept in a doorway and dreamt [End Page 63]
of sparkling cities. The flickering heavens reeled one innumerable self after another
past their closed eyes, but lo, they never learn. At dawn again they were cadging coffee, then kicking moss
on the shoulder of the highway with their thumbs out; but—Oh, Spain. They had a book
with pictures of Sevilla, the Alhambra, the Canary Islands—it was stamped pocatello
public library, and soon they’d lay eyes on those sparkling shores, birds yellow as the sunlight one of them said
dreamily—but no, said the other, it was dogs, loping black dogs the Spaniards had meant,
and they howled their consternation like men all night at the invaders. [End Page 64]
The recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, MIRIAM BIRD GREENBERG is currently working on an ethnographically derived poetry project about economic migrants living in Hong Kong. Her book In the Volcano’s Mouth won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and has just been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.*