Claude
An oath-poem in which 'every romantic plant / in the world' drains 'down to the bottom / of my george,' braiding family inheritance, Faulknerian Mississippi memory, and scripture into one body. The long prose-like sweep ends with the speaker declaring herself 'the way / through West Virginia' before dropping into a tight, sung quatrain about touching herself 'High as you get / Low as welll' and the flat coda 'It is with and without music.'
The piece reads as a woman taking inventory of everything that flows into her: thunder, 'the suck / up of tears,' a 'Mississippi Aunt' telling Faulkner-grade stories 'over candlelight,' and 'the second bible' that makes her 'a / part of being born now.' The age-claim 'I am not yet thirty three' quietly invokes Christ's age while 'he is / the cross that canyons look like down here' folds a man, the crucifixion, and Appalachian topography into a single shape, so that 'I have got to do pain again' sounds like both obligation and liturgy. The grand self-definition - 'I am the way / through West Virginia,' arms as 'the sway of a movie,' a personal 'universe' of stars in 'leftover daylight' - then collapses into the small private quatrain, which is where the real action is: trying 'in seconds / To touch myself,' the doubled 'l' in 'welll' stretching the word like the act. The closing 'It is with and without music' (a refrain that titles another piece in this sequence) frames the whole as something performed whether or not anyone is playing. Spellings like 'sware,' 'george,' and 'welll' are the persona's own and carry her spoken cadence; I have kept them as the source has them.