Virginia Hamilton Adair

Always the caravan of sound made us halt to admire the swinging and the swift go-by of beasts with enormous hooves and heads beating the earth or reared against the sky. Do not reread, I mean glance ahead to see what has become of the colossal forms: everything happened at the instant of passing: the hoof-beat, the whinny, the bells on the harness, the creak of the wheels, the monkey’s fandango in double time over the elephant’s back. When the marching was over and we were free to go on there was never before us a dungfall or a track on the road-sands of any kind: only the motion of footprints being made crossing and recrossing in the trampled mind.

Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads At last we came into the unleashed wind; The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread. Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand. Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land. Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails, The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails, We pushed into an overworld of wind and light Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon, And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun. We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour, Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall, Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.