A sack forward his back.A sack forward his back, his burlap shirt flapping iii a devil's wind, Thomas the Broken-Mouthed walks up and down the bad land, and between the bad believers, he was born in, and among. He walks up and down, his big ungainly stick striking the road just ahead of the pair still unsettled puffs of dust his bare feet raise. Thomas the Broken-Mouthed-called thus for his lies say any called thus for other reasons about others say. In each village brace or three fall behind him-disaffected vendors of comatose syrups, stiff-fingered cutpurses, sour camel drivers, well-poisoners, and children (milky-skinned, pock-marked) children of the rich, the clergymen pushing before them wooden-wheeled barrows of grain to bake into bread to eat forward the march. Thomas the Broken-Mouthed has a mission, within which is a vision, within which is a tiny black fire, Who will pile the drought-dried straw onward this fire, who will be the naphtha resin, who will chase the flames, who will be the sparks with fiery wings for me? asks Thomas the Broken-Mouthed, standing in succession a tree stump which reveals one hundr rings, single in kind hundred years that the parts now call The Last united Hundred Years. THOMAS LUX is a member of the writing faculty and director of the MFA program in verse at Sarah Lawrence College. For the spring semester he will also be the first owner of the McEver Chair in Writing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His just discovered book, The Street of Clock is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in spring 2001 photograph by the agency of Bill Johnson Copyright World numbers Incorporated Jan/Feb 2001 |
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