Clarksdale, Ithaca, Geneseo

Sentiments rise with the sun and vanish with the moon, similar to the way in which a river port moors for a night or two boats which then float away. “They All Go,” wrote Randall Jarrell. But I am presently bound to the deepest sort of impression that the only two geographies in which I have ever felt naturally-born, are the lakes and hills of upstate New York, and the Mississippi Delta. Port Gibson was declared “the town too beautiful to burn” in the Civil War, but that might equally have applied to Greenville. (One day I must drive from Cayuga Lake to Cayuga, Mississippi – this would be straight through – in Mississippi via the Natchez Trace.) The Civil War made one million persons dead out of the thirty million who then lived in the United States (Ten million in today’s dollars.) The moneyed people in the North deceived and suborned those fellaheen with no hope to engage militantly with the fellaheen with no hope in the South on behalf of the Confederacy’s moneyed people. The latter fellows supplanted their having been reduced to beasts of burden and wage slaves before the war with the entirely factitious Homeric and Tennysonian ideals of the glory of perpetuating slavery by reason of melanin.

According to some sources, Shakespeare rusticated-within-disguise and spent several months in Virginia, where he wrote a play (extant) that he willed to have produced on the 400^th anniversary of his death date, (which is to say, 2016). It is little-known that Henry James spent the summer of 1912 in Vermont, reading Proust in manuscript, and a long kept secret was the fact that Matisse passed most of 1952 at the eminently vulgar Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, which he pronounced the most pleasant place on earth. Dvorak summered in Spillville, Iowa. You may wish to look this up, too. Greenville, Mississippi is also known for its unraveling of statistical probability by salubriously hearthing an unusually large number of authors, among them Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Tennessee Williams (though the latter spent more time at the Cutrer Mansion in Clarksdale, also a soul’s balm village). Greenville, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Clarksdale; (Bourbon, Rosedale, Anguilla, Le Tourneau, Roxie, Redwood, Satartia, Nitta Yuma, Panther Burn, Hushpuckena, Alligator, Dubbs, and Bobo). This trip I will take in a convertible Saab, dark green.

Twenty years after souls had been freed from Auschwitz, which is to say, twenty years after souls had turn to melting and sparkling radium-fire in Nagasaki, some of us had retreated from battle engagement, and, except for a few skirmishes in the outlands, encamped mid the dusty lawns and copses of the Genesee Valley – a place in which, incidentally, despite my four years of residence, I never learned the cardinal compass points or ever felt topographically at home. The year before we had daily gathered round the chuckwagon in a place called Mary Jemison (a white girl raised among the native people, not so uncommon an occasion, as it turns out) and the next year for rations we stumbled over the lawns toward Letchworth, named for the nearby river gape. We did not bear weapons or memory; a peacetime army declines to attend muster. There was much mystification, and it seemed that nothing was not seen as through an opaque veil. Near Geneseo, there was a small park near a wandering stream, where we gathered in period costumes for afternoon charivaris and stupidly, recklessly, and pointlessly rode bareback the wild horses of our innocent and incipient wills. A monument there remembered the ignoble passings of Boyd and Parker, scouts of General Washington’s murderous and genocidal Sullivan Expedition. We used to picnic there (Alice B. Toklas Brownies, LSD, vodka-spiked lemonade, and cheeseburgers), by the tree around which by their intestines were those soldiers tied, run in circles, and finally fileted.

Someone had stolen her umbrella one rainy day, and afterwards she left at the coat rack scene of that purloining a note of the most sophisticated kind of sarcasm, well before that literary form had been by forty years corrupted with writhing pain and literal tears. I had not known that one might use English to fling the very wryest imprecations into the darkness of undifferentiated malfeasance, and the feat amazed me. After two martinis I place myself before my computer’s keyboard and swing lassos, fling javelins, sail down ocean swells at thirty knots. When I do this, or when I sit for hours reading or writing, I have in mind the girl who left a note intended to provoke the emotional disruption of the umbrella thief. She was the same person, I later learned, I had been secretly espying every day, and by whom I was fatally intrigued. She would come and go on the gentle hillside of the Genesee Valley, and by her I confected (as one will) a transubstantiation involving meat wrappings and wispy daydreams. She occasionally wore flowered, colored-print stockings. I think they depicted orchids or magnolias, but now I see them as Charleston dogwoods, hothouse bougainvillaea, tropical dahlias, tormenting daffodils, calla lilies, red red peonies, pornographic oleander, jazz gardenias, fen hibiscus, titillating hyacinths, amatory fuchsia, and sweaty hydrangea. Or maybe lotus flowers. Eventually she and I married and lived in Ithaca, but that didn’t work out well. There, in the hills by the lake, the only topography of which I was aware, was the cold and mean moonscape that her dazzling luminosity had made of my heart.