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A Violet in the Crucible
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A V I O L E T I N T H E C R U C I B L E Shelley wants you to visit Congress when he writes a violet in the crucible & when he notes imagination is enlarged by a sympathy that you may intuit environments as endangered creatures do when 7 million pounds of nitrogen flow into the Chesapeake—; as you push open the cherry wood door & the intern looks up from her map of wheels beside the philodendron with streaked anemic arrows & a jar of pens from pharmaceutical firms, Shelley knows you are endangered as the eyeless shrimp Stygobromus hayi living among rocks upstream in Virginia feeding on dying leaves is, or the Congressman you came to visit is endangered, feeding in the Rayburn cafeteria with the lobbyist from Bechtel, having left his aide endangered in a faux-maple carrel to work on the war funding bill where seedlings of the law have finished sprouting. You look at things to make them speak. You have threadlike legs found only in your species. The cogs are selling credits to the dams for phosphorous to go into the sea. When Shelley says ‹ the poet is the legislator › he means as the duskytail darter from Tennessee legislates or the Indiana bat, myotis sodalist, the dwarf wedgemussel half buried in Maryland with your bivalve in silt of your wetland habitat, as you, the vanishing northeastern bulrush from Massachusetts legislate by shrinking; he doesn’t mean you will live, he means you could live on listen. As the sturgeon 4 2 in a million pounds of phosphorous or the snowy plover from Cascadia might. The aide is living on listen too, he takes your words, there’s a little you in his left eye which tries to focus on your nervous speech, a stubby tassel swinging on his shoe; he’s got a friend in the Marines who likes it over there instead of working in the tire shop after high school. The punctuation falling from your eyes its eyes their eyes his eyes is merging with uh¨ uh¨ uh¨ uh¨ uh¨ uh¨ as he explains the Pentagon budget uh¨ uh¨ uh¨ uh¨ his sentences forming a five-star alkaline: We cannot leave them there without weapons uh-uh-uh-uhuhuh. He cannot see the stars camped in your heart, the bunchy bunched-up stars, though he also has stars in his heart & his friend the Marine has stars. When Shelley notes ‹ the poet is meant to cheer › he means your name is on the list right here, he means if you don’t survive this way there are others, he means send the report with your body— 4 3 ...