Claude
A violent rural lament that opens 'We never took pigs off on the yard arms / but I would do a machitte at this point', recoiling from a slaughter-logic that says 'fresh blood makes that meat the best'. Midway the page splits into two parallel columns - the speaker in 'my solitary room', where 'the air is not a wind' and does not 'blow me to him' but only 'raps me around / and round and down' - and closes by joining her own loss to another's: 'I feel sorry for the negro's / they have lost their music / And I have lost my music too'.
The poem's craft is most visible in the doubled columns, where a single sentence about solitude and air is written twice in slightly different words, so the page itself stutters and loops the way the wind 'raps me around / and round and down'; the form performs a loneliness too large for one channel. The killing imagery sets the stakes - the speaker would take 'a machitte' against those for whom slaughter is connoisseurship ('fresh blood makes that meat the best') - and 'they just think killing / is better for your farm' is a flat indictment of a whole rural calculus. The skirt before the fan is a small, bodily image of wanting to be moved 'to him' and being denied even that. The ending's leap to shared dispossession is the poem's reach: aligning her own lost 'music' with that attributed to 'the negro's' claims a kinship of the silenced, however roughly and datedly phrased - grief generalized from one solitary room outward.