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Why
should we do this? What good is it to us? Above
all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly
be done?
--Freud
1.
My name is
James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles
from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio,
where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my
father. He tried to teach me kindness. I
return Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried, To
dead Ohio, where I might lie buried, Had I not run
away before my time. Ohio caught George Doty. Clean
as lime, His skull rots empty here. Dying's the
best Of all the arts men learn in a dead place. I
walked here once. I made my loud display, Leaning for
language on a dead man's voice. Now sick of lies, I
turn to face the past. I add my easy grievance to the
rest:
2.
Doty, if I confess I do not
love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own
lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, My mind.
I run like the bewildered mad At St. Clair
Sanitarium, who lurk, Arch and cunning, under the
maple trees, Pleased to be playing guilty after
dark. Staring to bed, they croon
self-lullabies. Doty, you make me sick. I am not
dead. I croon my tears at fifty cents per
line.
3.
Idiot, he demanded love from
girls, And murdered one. Also, he was a thief. He
left two women, and a ghost with child. The hair,
foul as a dog's upon his head, Made such revolting
Ohio animals Fitter for vomit than a kind man's
grief. I waste no pity on the dead that stink, And
no love's lost between me and the crying Drunks of
Belaire, Ohio, where police Kick at their kidneys
till they die of drink. Christ may restore them
whole, for all of me. Alive and dead, those giggling
muckers who Saddled my nighmares thirty years
ago Can do without my widely printed sighing. Over
their pains with paid sincerity. I do not pity the
dead, I pity the dying.
4.
I pity
myself, because a man is dead. If Belmont County
killed him, what of me? His victims never loved him.
Why should we? And yet, nobody had to kill him
either. It does no good to woo the grass, to
veil The quicklime hole of a man's defeat and
shame. Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with
them. I kick the clods away, and speak my
name.
5.
This grave's gash festers.
Maybe it will heal, When all are caught with what
they had to do In fear of love, when every man stands
still By the last sea, And the princes of the sea
come down To lay away their robes, to judge the
earth And its dead, and we dead stand undefended
everywhere, And my bodies--father and child and
unskilled criminal-- Ridiculously kneel to bare my
scars, My sneaking crimes, to God's unpitying
stars.
6.
Staring politely, they will
not mark my face From any murderer's, buried in this
place. Why should they? We are nothing but a
man.
7.
Doty, the rapist and the
murderer, Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot
hear; And where, in earth or hell's unholy
peace, Men's suicides will stop, God knows, not
I. Angels and pebbles mock me under trees. Earth
is a door I cannot even face. Order be damned, I do
not want to die, Even to keep Belaire, Ohio,
safe. The hackles on my neck are fear, not
grief. (Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the
ground!) I hear the last sea in the Ohio
grass, Heaving a tide of gray
disastrousness. Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted
face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of
my flesh, defeated, underground.
James
Wright
Read poems about / on: sick,
grief,
sea,
father,
child,
fear,
dog,
women,
memory,
winter,
nature,
peace,
hair,
fire,
lost,
dark,
alone,
angel,
animal,
children
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