America. At first I was alone, as when going home. I was in an airport mall looking for the train platform and the women I used to know were there on the sidewalks and in the alleys and in parking lots, common rooms, school yards, and courthouses, as they had been before, making notes which deepen the lines in their flat-lipped faces. I had a ticket to Chicago in my hand and at my feet, on the escalator, my one heavy bag rode with me past their faces, their faces garish blue, their faces shadowed, their faces black or white, or mirrored, or reflected in the surfaces, passing. The escalator was a ferris wheel, a carousel full of black and white horses, the machine churning the same thing out again and again, where I might have found myself repeating myself, myself repeated again and again for the sake of my sake, now darkness, now lightness, now rising, now sinking again--still, still--the like in likeness: death:
but the fairgrounds went a long way out,
and I began walking. I began talking to you, cousins. Someone has drawn you in soft dark pencil, fetish and leathered, black or white--your nessie, my nessie--white or black, lithe cousins, legends, you hang on my walls. Someone has left a body in the grass, human, pale, horned as a gazelle and socket-eyed: passed away: look away, back towards where we came, where we will come again, where I will bring you back with me again and watch you look towards the cities beyond the dry river, towards the escalating windows in the sun, back again, the river rending through the many middle-americas, this side, this side, this side, this side, this side, the glass in the sun, the water drowning in sun, the drowned rising, sinking again, eddying against the bank.
See the sweet white flowers in the grass? They spread their faces, they turn their fair faces towards the fields. They are horned; they are socket-eyed. They are negatives. They are precisely alike: like that, the body in the grass stares into the sun and nothing, my cousins, and I am staring into you. Like you.
