The Chain Gang

Stripped to the waist, hard-muscled, downcast, under the guns of lounging guards, they are clearing a roadside across a palmetto landscape. I notice one blond boy swinging a pick, broad-shouldered.   His skin is smooth, bright, sweaty. His upright body ripples under the rigid fury of his face. His bulging eyes fixed on the ground can see mountains, the destiny of his imagination he can never get to, where he could rest, a lion in the wilderness of his flesh. I see the body with its own career of gestures— its bright roads, its dark roads apart, serene. . . Men must be carved, apparently, like slaughtered steers or pigs to find the marble of their bones innocent, innocent after all as the stones they break, or rain, or the guards in cages of their white voices. Trapped in one chained line, one terrifying combination of arrangements, driven to taste each other's flesh. . . The body sings alone among the earth's arrangements ignorant of crimes or dreams or the curious idea of justice.