Devotion: The Burnt-Over District

Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls, churched river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities and principalities of central New York, the hollows and corners of the burnt-over districts visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings, gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb, the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through the underbrush to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day. We learned obedience and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve. He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to block for punts— and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited for the cops and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance one does in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified, and swore and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead, and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he was befuddled with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes of his eyes. The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the indwelling beauty of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq with three others in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot. I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing, he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.