(from Negro Mountain)
She said,
Get your bearings.
No shape in my gap, not
now. From now
on, it goes
without
saying. If
this is allied to “the negro
character” it’s far
from original—I’d only get
to where we came out of the mountains and
hit the sea. And view
the old coast too, from
the road, the route described
by its indentations—“One bay
after another”—until the road turned inland
again. Civilization’s
tattered
in such. Far
be it from me. One’s
close to nothing.
Something,
though, to the coast—
“My affection
hath an unknowne bottome, like the Bay
of Portugall,” some-
one else had been made
to say.
Copyright © 2020 by C. S. Giscombe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 27, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.