Postscript
March 2025
Cherry Hill has a touch of the seasons.
You’re a little touched, she says.
I am by summer, fall, spring and winter.
The face, anyway is an accretion.
Here I see, variant, mutatis mutandis, over the days.
Every day, I walk through Cherry Hill, greetings
to guys in cargo shorts, women with pets, massasauga in spring,
swamp in high summer, sandhill cranes, lovers swinging on dead end paths.
The Manchurian crane: a representation in Mountains and Rivers Without End.
Other bodies have an analytical relation to the truth. Cherry Hill’s relation is:
On Cherry Hill’s body, I take off my shoes,
Like an Oberlin boy in first nature, like a Manchurian crane stepping out
To Lunch like a Japanese businessman, at the same hour,
Every day, for thirty years.
I find in the turbid grass, a baby rabbit.
Rabbits keep their nests in plain sight.
The man sets his lunch over the body of a woman.
The baby bunny is scared pornographic. She is naked.
When the dog bites,
There is a sick sound, funny, whoopied, yet like something collapsing.
The ritual is a Georgic ritual, his manual for dominion over allegory.
Integument, the body’s stretched Organ, impasto-ed by wind and sun.
The California sun exposes everything.
We drive there, waiting to be exposed.
✳