When a revolution has sufficently destroyed this common symbolism leading to common actions for usual purposes, society can only save itself from dissolution by means of a reign of terror. Those revolutions which escape a reign of terror have left intact the fundamental efficient symbolism of society.
—Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect
Up on Chickasaw Bluff see her go, girls
Up on Chickasaw Bluff spy her blue, blue shoes
— Marilee
1. A Natural History of Insurrection on the Inland Waterways
From Lipscombe came Einhorn (Heidelberg
gut doctor, partner to Schussler),
road connecting Institute to commerce east
of Olmstead’s park—O the heron flies
west above evening jays at raspberry hedge little Claude’s bridge Wormtown Dogs
St. Spyridon’s wall: Socrates Plato Aeschylus Sappho
The engineer Bourgault’s
gone down south for his wife’s memory—
entrusting us here with hip roof and hydrangeas,
bare servants’ quarters, a broad oak table offering
of the Scouts of America; red petals littering rhubarb’s
palmate cradle. Here. (They say Wuhstah
records rained Chelsea in ‘53
east—
to an old world, older still now I’m here,
parley of Jubal and Doyle, he-that-hymns-
waterways and Marilee’s story splitting
my head, rivering, far reaches, double-
Carthage, Santiago’s rhythm and shells (here
the cheapest breadfruit in town), this or that
small Roman city (they’re all roamin’ cities) East
Anglia, on the trick of that outlaw, Bea, lit
out from those wicked territories: Arkansas,
Oklahoma; Dallas, Lucifer’s own pasture—and the boys.
6. Letters
Dear Marilee,
I set out already and will be gone by the time you get this. I cain’t go back to Carthage since they razed it twice (some said them philistines spread salt over daddy’s accursed fields). It’s all yella talk. Remember that. You’ve been a victim, too. Sposin’ everybody’s a victim these days. But you got a voice and two good feet and you’re quick with the sharp. Them Dallas days are over. No more black velvet where I’m goin. No more roulette. Jack mighta been my true love, but who’s to say now? An I ain’t proud of ‘im in my bed whilst Samuel was still bargainin’ with Peter, barely an ounce lighter. Our lord is open-hearted to the Cherokee, I reckon, but what of black-eyed wimmin who leave their babies to adventure?
I’ll write when I get where I am. Until then remember the days at the piano I freighted up the bend an us singin “Peace in the Valley” (your daddy’s favorite) an’“I Hear You Knockin.’” An’ that one summer when you kept playin “The Entertainer” and “Nadia’s Theme” over and over til I liked t’ killed you an’ offed m’self! Those were good times. Don’t forget them or me.
Your friend, Bea
P.S.—Keep an eye out for Quantrill’s gang and them that wear those red parachute pants an’ run around with Jimmy Lane in town. They’ll turn ya’ or kill ya’ – and it don’t matter which side you’re on.
P.P.S.—“Carthage est delenda”
…my languages haven’t deserted me all these years.
They say she’s her daddy’s brainchild
They say her granny’s been years in the ground
They say she left that attic room
Cuz tombs won’t let you get around
All you good girls won’t you c’mon
7. Marilee’s Diary
Me and Jubal and the cabby
after the airport and before
Baptist
Hospital, blanched and humble, ditch and johnson grass—
To lie down here
hove-to heretofore assemblage
of
myself - my contraband of coupe capsized
patrolled
by regiments who lie in wait down here.
Me escaping a funeral and Jubal off for Sebastian County to see a girl, the cabby kept saying: folks come down hyere…rightchyere…a lotta folks…
Down before the shorelines’ demarcations
where contrasts edged and angled out of city
open into waterways, points of place
replacing--
(river
to the west
broad and brown,
moseying,
crosshatching I-40,
the
bridge!
Before my
Richardson’s Lake
Michigan
the contoured
pharmekos of Ms. Callistemon,
our lady of the
fiberglass – who glimmers
in the runoff
from the avenue,
O fortuna, our
figurehead with eyes
like coins or
olive
recounting first
my fall
in the Straights
of Mackinaw:
alleyway, took off his pants. He drank the bottle chased on Big Red before I
gave’em back. By then he was singing “ain’t gonna study war no more….” Expect I ruined ‘im for the girls in Arkansas.
(we shoulda cussed the lady in the airport and paid the cabby half)
12. Allegories from the Front
…the what of the past in us, so far as the world is past and settled.
Of the two chairs Reuben salvaged when the waters backed
one he dubbed electric, one fit for a king.
A Hymn of Glorification performed at sunset
fills the Chamber of the Oaken Chair.
The gardeners have crafted Labyrinth of Fallopio
from plantings of hornbeam and yew.
In the name of Adonis, great gangs of healthy, robust novices
guard the bowry from unsought contact with all beyond.
Marilee plays guitar ahead of each processional
upon whom the wayfarer showers his rations of grain.
Down from the cypress along the riverbank, Piasa
the Storm Bird of Ouatoga dusts her footprints from the ash.
Beyond the water break on wing dams,
voices from the boats slipping by –
What among the marigolds is left us, Mississippi.
Epilogue
…there was lots of bad trouble on the border back then. There wasn't much
way you could sit back and not take sides.
What takes shape and in taking, turns
the water’s edge edgewise to form
a boundary, as a fresh breeze
that breaks the water’s surface
into surfaces—
Barefoot in fish grass
among the daffodils and paper birch,
feeding his elks after mass,
with his bar broom sweeping up the sad, lovely poems, singing
zimne piwo, zimne piwo again and again (twas only feelings, you said),
galloping on about rubber dresses, talcum, Little Egypt—
(some say was us introduced whiskey to the territory)
across a table givin’ whatfor to that deaf Yank:
Could you repeat that?
Tutto venire a tavolo e mangiare!
(from his hands chillirone, calamari oriolese, Salvuto until satiated)
and a pochade of girls:
Maryjanes bright lips mussed hair a look and trains to elsewhere….
Alone and here (the postman as my witness) seems a scruffy
arcadia (his story, too): window to Chinatown, ruck o’ tourists just east,
press of midnight chocolate—the bridge!
tamales lilac smoke…
(this road, Herr Einhorn’s story, but ain’t nobody says ‘mornin nor windabox marigolds,
nor rancheras to hear yourself
feel—ni “gracias a dios”
From the cab we saw 2 wrecks! A pink Cadillac burning on the side of the road (some sissy boy with his mouth open and blue-singed shoes) and a’57 DeSoto Firesweep that looked like it had been sinking for days, years even—all fins and bubble. A mucked shine of a city!
Authors’ Note:
When my father was contacted in the autumn of 1974 by Karen Cycholl regarding the collection of Civil War diaries on loan from St. Louis to the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston, SC, he reluctantly agreed to help review those texts as sources for a book on service and resistance.
He was hesitant at first, wanting no part in an apology for the Confederacy. But he believed there was the potential for an important book on farmers and workers resisting repressive regimes.
The families who lived along the ridge of Chickasaw Bluff, which runs between Fulton and Memphis, TN, found themselves over time, in conflict with French, British, and Union troops as a consequence of nothing more than topography. My father reached out to Leigh Graham, who had extensive knowledge of the region, and asked her to tackle the project with him.
After a year of research and conversation, they met at her office in Worcester, MA, to complete the manuscript. Within two weeks, my father was institutionalized. I have photographs of the desk he used there – stacks of papers, note cards, and books he read to get away from academic work: E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Fussell’s The Great War, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and, Ashbery’s Self-Portrait - all books just to press that year.
Graham abandoned the project shortly thereafter, and sent all of the notes and the finished manuscript back to Charleston. Cycholl sent my father’s notes and other assorted belongings to my family, and kept the only extant manuscript in her office at the Charleston Museum.
In October 1981, a fire destroyed the old museum leaving only the portico and its four columns which are now a monument within a park. Cycholl cited several passages from the manuscript in Blue Mound to 161, and those excerpts are all we have of the original manuscript today.
I worked with Graham’s daughter, Lea, an accomplished poet, to make sense of the manuscript fragments and the notes our parents left behind. We would like to do more with these texts, even reconstruct a manuscript that serves my father’s initial goals.
--JB & LG
John Breedlove’s work has been published in places like the Notre Dame Review and Near South. He lives between his hometown of Charleston, SC and Toulouse, France.
Lea Graham’s third chapbook, Spell to Spell, appeared this summer through above/ground press in Ottawa and her second book of poems, From the Hotel Vernon, is forthcoming from Salmon Press in 2019. She lives between Rosendale, NY and Mayflower, AR.
You can find recent work from both Breedlove and Graham in the current Politics/Letters special feature on Robert Kroetsch: http://politicsslashletters.live/literary/autoverse/car-poems-for-robert-kroetsch-part-i/.