Betty Adcock

I'm just an assistant with the Vanishing Act. My spangled wand points out the disappeared. It's only a poor thing made of words, and lacks the illusive power to light the darkling year. Not prophecy, not elegy, but fact: the thing that's gone is never coming back. Late or soon a guttering silence will ring down a curtain like woven smoke on thickening air. The audience will strain to see what's there, the old magician nowhere to be found. For now, I wear a costume and dance obliquely. The applause you hear is not for me, its rabid sound like angry rain—as one by one the known forms cease to be: childhood, the farm, the river, forested ground; the tiger and the condor, the whale, the honeybee; the village, the book, the lantern. Then you. Then me.

The wooden scent of wagons, the sweat of animals—these places keep everything—breath of the cotton gin, black damp floors of the icehouse. Shadows the color of a mirror’s back break across faces.  The luck is always bad.  This light is brittle, old pale hair kept in a letter. The wheeze of porch swings and lopped gates seeps from new mortar. Wind from an axe that struck wood a hundred years ago lifts the thin flags of the town.