The low velocity of the limbs in pain, as they do hurtle nevertheless their hurtling is not faster than the eye which, looking hard, should there be no wind is itself unable sometimes to discern movement, which means, perhaps, that it is the awed eye which in this case is comatose, still, moving with a rapidity which of course kills, although it may be, not for a good while; as in a travelogue, in the junctures between musics there falls a considerable period of time to be occupied by my voice, as in a newsreel, after the shot and before the music resumes, a limited time for conversation, questions, or familiar supposition, barely yet curiously ample time for your dread report.
/ 1

/ 2

The two-toned Olds swinging sideways out of the drive, the bone-white gravel kicked up in a shot, my mother in the deathseat half out the door, the door half shut--she's being pushed or wants to jump, I don't remember.
The Olds is two kinds of green, hand-painted, and blows black smoke like a coal-oil fire. I'm stunned and feel a wind, like a machine, pass through me, through my heart and mouth; I'm standing in a field not fifty feet away, the wheel of the wind closing the distance.
Then suddenly the car stops and my mother falls with nothing, nothing to break the fall . . .
One of those moments we give too much to, like the moment of acknowledgment of betrayal, when the one who's faithless has nothing more to say and the silence is terrifying since you must choose between one or the other emptiness. I know my mother's face was covered black with blood and that when she rose she too said nothing.
Language is a darkness pulled out of us.
But I screamed that day she was almost killed, whether I wept or ran or threw a stone, or stood stone-still, choosing at last between parents, one of whom was driving away.
/ 3

/ 4

/ 5

(whirl wheel)
“Nothing here, nothing here,”
I have called.
Swollen cords upon my throat
Stand rigid as a hardened rope.
”What is this to enter my door?”
The silent recluse, death
And life, in a gnarled root
Has risen from the scum,
Sprawled, and choked by food.
Taste it, eat it in the wood drift
Where wild lilies bear pod-seed,
And reeds are a drill for flutes.
O, I have occasioned naught
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/ 7

So sour am I on April my inspiration not good enough.
L Fel
P Jeanette Lerman
1 – at 1 o’clock
12 o’clock bus
---
Black Mountain College –
Neat and orderly –
Well-organized
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