Seam

Reading Willa Cather in Bangladesh

13 Reading Willa Cather in Bangladesh —with lines from The Song of the Lark Things came too fast for her; she had not had enough preparation. Gray sky to gray land, the plane noses down—I am unchanged, like the mural of brown faces still trapped in the concrete frame bordering the runway. The plane circles back, keeps time with a blinking screen—how, in a country split from tip to tip by such black mold, can each bright eye locked inside the mural still stare straight ahead, sideways, or to the sky? Each map I have seen of this country obscures: each blue line, each emerald 14 inch of land cannot claim such cloudy veins, these long porous seams between us still irrepressible— ...