Wild Horses

                                                 by William Faulkner

. . . When the others turned, they saw that the woman had left the wagon too, though they had not known she was there since they had not seen the wagon drive up. She came among them behind the man, gaunt in the gray shapeless garment and the sunbonnet, wearing stained canvas gymnasium shoes She overtook the man but she did not touch him, standin gjust behind him, her hands rolled before her into the gray dress

“Henry,” she said in a flat voice. Th eman looked over his shoulder.

“Get back to that wagon,” he said.

“Here, missus,” the Texan said. “Henry's going to get the bargain of his life in about a minute. Here, boys, let the missus come up close where she can see. Henry's going to pick out that saddle-horse the missus has been wanting. Who says ten - - --”

“Henry,” the woman said. She did not raise her voice. She had not once looked at the Texan. She touched the man's arm. He turned and struck her hand down.

“Get back to that wagon like I told you.” The woman stood behind him, her hands rolled again into her dress. She was not looking at anything, speaking to anyone.

He aint no more despair than to buy one of them things,” she said. “And us not but five dollars away from the poor-house, he aint no more despair.” The man turned upon her with that curious air of leashed, of dreamlike fury. The others lounged along the fence in attitudes gravely attentive, almost oblivious. Mrs Littlejohn had been washing for some time now, pumping rhythmically up and down above the wash-board in the sud-foamed tub. She now stood erect again, her soap-raw hands on her hips, looking into the lot.

“Shut your mouth and get back in that wagon,” the man said. “Do you want me to take a wagon stake to you?” He turned and looked up at the Texan. “Did you give him that horse?” he said. The Texan was looking at the woman. Then he looked at the man; still watching him, he tilted the paper carton over his open palm. A single cake came out of it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is the fellow that bids in this next horse going to get that first one too?”

“No,” the Texan said.

“All right,” the other said. “Are you going to give a horse to the man that makes the first bid on the next one?”

“No,” the Texan said.

“Then if you were just starting the auction off by giving away a horse, why didn't you wait till we were all here?” The Texan stopped looking at the other. He raised the empty carton and squinted carefully into it, as if it might contain a precious jewel or perhaps a deadly insect. Then he crumpled it and dropped it carefully beside the post on which he sat.

“Eck bids two dollars,” he said. “I believe he still thinks he's bidding on them scraps of bob-wire they come here in instead of one of the horses. But I got to accept it. But are you boys ----”

“So Eck's going to get two horses at a dollar a head,” the newcomer said. “Three dollars.” The woman touched him again He flung her han off without turning and she stood again, her hands rolled into her dress across her flat stomach, not looking at anything.

“Misters,” she said, “we got chaps in the house that never had shoes last winter. We aint got corn to feed the stock. We got five dollars I earned weaving by firelight after dark. And he aint no more despair.”

“Henry bids three dollars,” the Texan said. “Raise him a dollar, Eck, and the horse is yours.” Beyond the fence the horses rushed suddenly and for no reason and as suddenly stopped, staring at the faces along the fence.

“Henry,” the woman said. The man was watching Eck. His stained and broken teeth showed a little beneath his lip. His wrists dangled into fists below the faded sleeves of his shirt too short from many washings.

“Four dollars,” Eck said.

“Five dollars!' the husband said, raising one clenched hand. He shouldered himself forward toward the gate-post. The woman did not follow him. She now looked at the Texan for the first time. Here eyes were a washed gray also, as though they had faded too like the dress and the sunbonnet.

“Mister,” she said, “if you take that five dollars I earned my chaps a-weaving for one of them things, it'll be a curse on you and yours during all the time of man.”

“Five dollars!” the husband shouted. He thrust himself up to the post, his clenched hand on a level with the Texan's knees. He opened it upon a wad of frayed banknotes and silver. “Five dollars! And the man that raises it will have to beat my head off or I'll beat hisn.”

“All right,” the Texan said. “Five dollars is bid. But don't you shake your hand at me.”

At five oclock that afternoon the Texan crumpled the third paper carton and dropped it to the earth beneath him. In the copper slant of the leveling sun which fell also upon the line of limp garments in Mrs Littlejohn's backyard and which cast his shadow and that of the post on which he sat long across the lot where now and then the ponies still rushed in purposeless and tireless surges, the Texan straightened his leg and thrust his hand into his pocket and took out a coin and leaned down to the little boy. His voice was now hoarse, spent. “Here, bud,” he said. “Run to the store and get me a box of gingersnaps”

From William Faulkner's  "Wild Horses, " Three Famous Short Novels (Vintage 2011).

A man pining for a woman dead on a slab at St. James

                                By Natasha Trethewey

Geography

1.

At the bottom of the exit ramp

my father waits for us, one foot

on the curb, right hand hooked

in the front pocket of his jeans,

a stack of books beneath his arm.

It's 1971, the last year we're still

together. My mother and I travel

this road, each week, to meet him –

I-10 from Mississippi to New Orleans –

            and each time we pull off the highway

            I see my father like this: raising his thumb

to feign hitchhiking – a stranger

passing through to somewhere else.

2.

At Wolf River my father is singing.

The sun is singing and there's a cooler

of Pabst in the shade. He is singing

and playing the guitar – the sad songs

I hide from each time: a man pining

for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead

on a slab at St. James. I'm too young to know

this is foreshadowing. To get away from

the blues I don't understand, I wade in water

shallow enough to cross. On the bank

at the other side, I look back at him as if

across the years: he's smaller, his voice

lost in the distance between us.

3.

On the Gulf and Ship Island Line

my father and I walk the rails south

toward town. More than twenty years

gone, he's come back to see this place,

recollect what he's lost. What he recalls

of my childhood is here. We find it

in the brambles of blackberry, the coins

flattened on the tracks. We can't help it –

already, we're leaning too hard

toward metaphor: my father searching

for the railroad switch. It was here, right

here, he says, turning this way and that –

the rails vibrating now, a train coming.

From Natasha Trethewy, Thrall (2012).

Shadows of your hands in firelight

            By John Hollander

                 115-116

Arachne spies by the door on wise Penelope

To learn what will be her own undoing. By lamplight

She sees the busy shuttle going back on itself

With a more favulous skill than when, that afternoon,

It had been proudly building the fabric of a shroud.

Taking apart the cover of darkness fabricates

Light, and Time itself goes forward by unravelling:

So the queen's dismembering hand weaves te images

Of faith and remembrance on the bared warp of her loom.

Arachne ignores the lessons of nay-saying that

Lurking in what she sees there in the midnight's uwrking.

Her eyes are only for the energies of result,

Of what is spun out of oneself in devout silence.

Such emblems of old craftiness that are clear enough

Still to read, point to the one step forward, two-and-a-

Half steps back that everyone eventually gets

Used to. Now you sit on that red prayer-rug, undoing

A dark scarf, skeining the wool in puzzlement, as if

The process should not be still continuing, nature

Having forgotten when to stop, knowing it too well.

But we need not despair of negations: bits of yarn

Snipped far too short for knitting were tied, knot after knot,

Onto the warp and weft of some anatolian

Frame, shunning all human figures for the intricate

Shapes, “purely decorative,” geometric, that lie

Refigured now with shadows of your hands in firelight.

                                                                                                  Fancy-Work

From Powers of Thirteen, in John Hollander, Selected Poetry (1993).

The riddle of a storefront

THREE POEMS

by David Keplinger

Beatification

            The only soul                      who beatifies itself

             is the lightening bug                      of North America

also called firefly               also called

Half-in-love                                     with-dusty-death

also called slant-                 of-light also known

as Hobo-who-believes-he's-Jesus

and You-                              oh-my-soul

which announces                            its coming greased

with luceferin: Never         venerate yourself

in the presence                                of children

is the lesson here                the flashing timed

metronomically                             which enables the child

to track you                         to follow the rhythm

snap his fist                                   and squeeze

R

It was a language of white hills, red brick towns.

An alley was a comma in the agony's grammar.

It was the old one tied against a chair, madness swelling like a thought

too big for her head, and each death was a period. The mortician

a stain, a drop of ink in his black suit, before

a page-white mausoleum. It was a language

of yeast soup, snowy hills, towns called Beauty and Cold,

where even the names of things had a kind of corresponding

order, beauty always going cold, always losing itself

to something permanent. There was fish at the fishmonger,

paper at the paper store. Time at the clockmaker's shop.

There were syntactical surprised: the headmaster turned janitor 

in a matter of a day, the ambassador

seen on the subway in tattered clothes, the president

dressed as a prisoner, delivering his acceptance speech,

the secret police dressed as tourists on their own beat.

But mostly it was a language one used when speaking

in a whisper, rolling the “R,” practicing the “R” in your mouth

until it dropped from the palette to the tongue

as from the pocket of God, and hung there momentarily

in its shiny majesty, a sound much older than the language

that spent it, that offered it from mouth

to mouth like money.

A City I'm Traveling To

No solution hath the riddle of a storefront.

Its awnings billow up in wind and light

The waiters in their tiny jackets pull

Their jackets sown against the sudden cold.

A servant bears a latched up trunk, ruefully,

ruefully! And a certain old woman is waiting

To sell me a flower: to offer it with one hand,

To cover her teeth with the other.

From The American Poetry Review, September-October 2014.