Or limp or mended boots but said nothing, let the marchers
Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice Saying, We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight! Horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water, Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power Themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn,Ĭreatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land.īeatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passedĪs spirits. It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowedĪnd turned to winter. Their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing. Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staringĪt the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats. Without, send money, call home long distance about the heat.Īt first she thought the lump in the road If she meant to live in the present, she would have to work, do Vanish like an old photograph thrown onto live coals. What had she given her back, that woman, anything all these years? The green fruit and purple flowers, fierce eyes of living creatures. Had pulled a brush through her hair, whose hands had brought her maypops, They would be joinedīy the memory of walking back up Depot Street.Īnd say: I have changed, have tried to replace the iron heart with a heart of flesh.īut the woman whose hands had washed her, They'd be divided by past belief, the town's parallel tracks, To visit at her house, sat unsteady in a chair in the smoky room, The eyes of children she had raised for others. If she cared for her company, pictures under table glass, If she was sitting, knotted feet to the stove, if the coal had lasted, Whether she had, this spring, Beatrice did not know. The scar, the woman who had walked beside her then, splitīut determined to live, raising mustard greens to get through There they waited for wheels to rush like the wings of an iron angel,įor the white man at the engine to blow the whistle. Past the cotton gin, onto the bridge above the railroad tracks.
They flared and smoked like the sawmill fires she walked pastĪs a child, in the afternoon at 4 o'clock, she and a dark woman, Years revolved, began to circle Beatrice, a ring of burning eyes. The sky stared down.Īt the center of the world's blue eye, the woman stared back. She furrowed herselfīy hand through the ground. Her legs endedĪt the ankle, old brown cypress knees. Her chair into fragile clumps of new grass.
Roxboro Road, she'd seen a woman with no feet wheel On roller skates, pull a string of children, grinning, gaudy-Įyed as merry-go-round horses, brass wheeled
In Hollywood, California (she'd been told) women travel
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