Atsuro Riley

— Way on back through the underwood by Bowen’s Canal Well we’d heard it to be veiny with cottonmouths I’m not gonna lie. • For true the sheer (snake-electric) back-beyond of the place put a pull on us like a magnet. • That that rag-rope (flagged and) barred the path just egged us on. • (To go and skulk- and sidle-learn to palp and tap the edge to crack us in.) • — What’d we feel there once we’d crossed? • Veritable thought-thick trunks of swampfoot oaks. • Something like ‘a shift in the structure of experience.’ • Here was Johnny Pep (shrapped home from war) branch-dragging agglomerating discards and disjecta. • His craving wove a plexus (more a house) from limbs and leaves. • He knit us in: he left us be.   He let us watch he watched us try (to climb to ape his crisscross weave) to pitch to plait the roof. • Something like ‘Yall strayboys welcome to be welcome if you work.’ • Didn’t we ‘work’ — particular night-hoots (and near-chromatic whistle-riffs) in echo; likenesses he whittled live from hickory showed us how. • He’d let us watch him strip and shave the shagbark bark to taste (to read) to mull the grain. • Something like ‘root-room’ I reckon.   Something like • ‘When Johnny Pep hitched home from war we took to carving (curing) scraplings into shapes.’

The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized. This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. I wonder does her boy talk Chinese? You ever seen that kind of black-headed? Blue shine all in it like a crow.

— We seen his mama she dry and scant By hook or by bent I guttle the rudimental stories. I’m all in-scoop suck and swallow by dint of birth. Of shape. — Were you hallow-nursed on riversource upon a time (or ‘the rocky breasts forever’) I was not. I learned to lie in want for succor-food; for forms; I lunged I gulped for what I got. Nowadays to need to come by what comes by here comes natural and needs no bait. Just steep dead-still as a blacksnake creek and wait.

Split the boy       —his thorax, throat Pierce-peel the craw: A jag-crystalled crust      —his black scoria, slag (not Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled) What no gizzard ground (could hope to grind) What would not mesh What would not smelt Embedded undigested there in meat

Her cart like a dugout canoe. Had been an oak trunk. Cut young.      Fire-scoured. What was bark what was heartwood :P u r e   C h a r - H o l e Adze-hacked and gouged. Ever after (never not) wheeling hollow there behind her. Up the hill toward Bennett Yard; down through Eight-Mile, the Narrows. C o m e s   C l a r y   b y   h e r e   n o w Body bent past bent.      Intent upon horizon and carry. Her null eye long since gone isinglassy, opal. —The potent (brimming, fluent) one looks brown. C o u r s e s   C l a r y   s u r e   a s   b a y o u   t h r o u g h   h e r e  n o w Bearing (and borne ahead by) hull and hold behind her. Plies the dark. Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee. C r o s s e s   C l a r y   b l e s s   h e r   b a r r o w   u p   t h e r e   n o w Pausing and voweling there—   the place where the girl fell. (                  ) Afterwhile passing. Comes her cart like a whole-note held.

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn't sleep, the boy river-brinked and chorded. Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided. Sieved our alluvial sounds— Perseverating fiddler-crabs pockworking the pluff-mud; (perforated) home-bank gurgle and seethe; breathing burrow-holes, under-warrens, (pitched) pent-forts, coverts; a rabbity heart-hammering amongst the canes; bleat of something; sleeping Mama grinding (something) with her jaw; Daddy rut-graving gravel driving off; the desolated train-trestle rust-buckling   —and falling; an echo-tolling cast-iron skillet like a gong; downrivering gone(gone)gone(gone); Sylvia supper-calling her fish-camp fish with a bell; putting her tea kettle! wren-calls on for the crying marsh-wren orphans; R.T. tale-telling down by Norton's Store "Where every Story cauls a Grief"; Daddy   —nine-eyed,knee-walking—   aisle-weeping at the Bi-Lo; Mama mash-sucking sour loquats in the shed; ire-salts quartzifying in the dark; the caustics; the fires; far Fever Creek revival-tents hymning and balming; bees thrive-gilding the glade; hand-strang bottle-oaks (and intricated yardwire-works) clocking and panging; Viaduct Forge & Foundry beating time; the bait-boys along the dock drum-dunting their buckets; vowel-howling over the water; the river; RIVER.