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Read Online One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] by C. D. Wright - Free Book Online
Authors: C. D. Wright
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published or a popular Negro social studies teacher was fired for an insubordinate letter to the superintendent and a spontaneous rebellion sprang up in a Negro classroom in the form of flying chairs and raggedy books and a pop bottle thrown at a light fixture, and then, the lists of long long suffered degradations backed up and overflowed:
Parades without permits/ Boycotted stores
Funeral home turned into a Freedom Center
Kids arrested en masse and put in a swimming pool
V died during Operation Enduring Freedom
A bottle a day, she got annihilated/ Two packs a day
Always preoccupied with last things/ Always a touch eschatological
Always took a little tabula rasa with her caffeine
When I asked the neighbor if she knew the woman who lived there in 1969/
Oh yes she said/ She knew her
She didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust her
I don’t blame her though/ Everything
was so confusing/ She stayed to herself
She was overwhelmed/ That poor woman...
She was right/ We were wrong
VINDICATION
They’ve got souls/ Just like you and me
INTERPOSITION AND NULLIFICATION
The marchers are approaching the town of Hazen
where not so long ago an earth scraper turned up
a mastodon skull and a tusk on the old military road
In Big Tree: People are turning in
Only sure thing were the prices:
Grown-ups know the cost of a head of lettuce,
a fryer, a package of thighs; a $500 bag of seed
covers about 5 acres; it takes 20 square feet of cotton
for a medium-size blouse; where nothing is planted,
nothing much grows. The dirt is hard-packed.
The trees were gone by the first war. The first to go,
the most marvelous one, the red cypress,
made beautiful instruments. The fields,
not gone, but empty. Cotton turned to soybeans.
Mussels from the river turned to salvage.
Fishing for tires on the silted-up water.
Some are left digging an old bur out of their foot.
Some go up/Some go down [Big Tree church sign]
A race-free conversation hard to have back then.
Back then, the hotdog wagon doubled as a brothel.
Come again.
DEAR ABBY,
I am 11 years old but I know all the facts of life because I live in a dirty neighborhood. My problem is that in our family we get pregnate quick. My sister got pregnate when she was 16 just by sitting next to a boy in church. Can this be?
DEAR YOUNG MISS,
No, somebody must have moved.
+ + +
People study the dingy chenille clouds for a sign.
People did what they have done.
A town, a time, and a woman who lived there.
And left undone what they ought not to have did.
+ + +
I take one more drive across town thinking about the retired welding teacher easing over that rise seeing the parking lot full of white men. I wonder if he thought he would die in the jungle [where no Vietcong ever called him [N-word] ] or he would die in front of the bowling alley [without ever having been inside] or die in the swimming pool [without ever having been in it, except when drained, and the police had him in their sights]. Or if, because he was a young man, he would never die. I attach V to my driving-around thoughts.
An object unworthy of love she thought she was.
It was a cri de coeur.
Those of our get had given her a nom de guerre: V.
A simple act, to join a march against fear
down an old military road.
We were watching an old movie the night
the table started walking toward us
and there was trouble on Division.
She became a disaffiliated member [of her race].
I’m one of them now, she said, upon release
from jail. I am an Invader.
To feel in conjunction with the changes
of my time. The most alive I’ve ever been.
My body lifted itself from the chair
it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.
To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing.
Yet it has come to my attention that a whisper campaign
has been directed against the main character,
an invisible woman. She could have buried her feelings
like power lines; walked around free
and common as the air that bathes the globe or
sued the chickenshits and gone to live in Provence
smelling of Gauloises and
Parades without permits/ Boycotted stores
Funeral home turned into a Freedom Center
Kids arrested en masse and put in a swimming pool
V died during Operation Enduring Freedom
A bottle a day, she got annihilated/ Two packs a day
Always preoccupied with last things/ Always a touch eschatological
Always took a little tabula rasa with her caffeine
When I asked the neighbor if she knew the woman who lived there in 1969/
Oh yes she said/ She knew her
She didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust her
I don’t blame her though/ Everything
was so confusing/ She stayed to herself
She was overwhelmed/ That poor woman...
She was right/ We were wrong
VINDICATION
They’ve got souls/ Just like you and me
INTERPOSITION AND NULLIFICATION
The marchers are approaching the town of Hazen
where not so long ago an earth scraper turned up
a mastodon skull and a tusk on the old military road
In Big Tree: People are turning in
Only sure thing were the prices:
Grown-ups know the cost of a head of lettuce,
a fryer, a package of thighs; a $500 bag of seed
covers about 5 acres; it takes 20 square feet of cotton
for a medium-size blouse; where nothing is planted,
nothing much grows. The dirt is hard-packed.
The trees were gone by the first war. The first to go,
the most marvelous one, the red cypress,
made beautiful instruments. The fields,
not gone, but empty. Cotton turned to soybeans.
Mussels from the river turned to salvage.
Fishing for tires on the silted-up water.
Some are left digging an old bur out of their foot.
Some go up/Some go down [Big Tree church sign]
A race-free conversation hard to have back then.
Back then, the hotdog wagon doubled as a brothel.
Come again.
DEAR ABBY,
I am 11 years old but I know all the facts of life because I live in a dirty neighborhood. My problem is that in our family we get pregnate quick. My sister got pregnate when she was 16 just by sitting next to a boy in church. Can this be?
DEAR YOUNG MISS,
No, somebody must have moved.
+ + +
People study the dingy chenille clouds for a sign.
People did what they have done.
A town, a time, and a woman who lived there.
And left undone what they ought not to have did.
+ + +
I take one more drive across town thinking about the retired welding teacher easing over that rise seeing the parking lot full of white men. I wonder if he thought he would die in the jungle [where no Vietcong ever called him [N-word] ] or he would die in front of the bowling alley [without ever having been inside] or die in the swimming pool [without ever having been in it, except when drained, and the police had him in their sights]. Or if, because he was a young man, he would never die. I attach V to my driving-around thoughts.
An object unworthy of love she thought she was.
It was a cri de coeur.
Those of our get had given her a nom de guerre: V.
A simple act, to join a march against fear
down an old military road.
We were watching an old movie the night
the table started walking toward us
and there was trouble on Division.
She became a disaffiliated member [of her race].
I’m one of them now, she said, upon release
from jail. I am an Invader.
To feel in conjunction with the changes
of my time. The most alive I’ve ever been.
My body lifted itself from the chair
it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.
To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing.
Yet it has come to my attention that a whisper campaign
has been directed against the main character,
an invisible woman. She could have buried her feelings
like power lines; walked around free
and common as the air that bathes the globe or
sued the chickenshits and gone to live in Provence
smelling of Gauloises and
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