In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

WRAITHS Where he strode birds sang though worm-riven, and wraiths of mist rose about him, condensed on the hairs of his ears and they sang there, and glistened roundly— they sang and rang in the tormented, suffering woods and in beads of the rainbow in shifting, dancing, lacy light through wind-rummaged walnuts and sycamores and hickories, mottling earth, mottling grass, mottling copperhead, rabbit, gnat, june bug, lightning bug, slug, toadstool pale as an old mother's dead favored son's face, yellow, erupting almost, pushing inexorably, briefly, through mossy loam into night, almost nothing, almost nothing to crush, to sweep away, mottling path, street, sidewalk, boots, shoulders, hands, dark curly hair where the wraiths condensed as well, mottling southern mountain summer weeds, tall Goldenrod and Queen Anne's Lace with its carrot embedded in the cool, dark, sharp-grassed soil over which lay heavily the copper-colored serpent, the dragon breathing a thin black flame into the sunlight— and through the beads of the rainbow that were his eyes he saw another of the gods dying out, its great black and white body and its long neck and red head, the Lord God woodpecker, and he heard its wild cry after it had disappeared— who would not say, having never heard it before, that it was not the cry of a demon? what could make such a mournful, lecherous, unselfconscious cry but the devil's child, yea, a child of earth? Aaaiiieee! All gained! Aaaiiieed! All lost! —Marion Hodge 37 ...

pdf

Share