At the end of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim finally tells Huck the dead man in the house they encountered earlier floating down the river was Huck’s father, and Huck, now aware and free of family, and now bored with his friend Tom Sawyer’s boyish ways, decides it’s time to cut out:
“…and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
I’m with Huck, though it’s too late for me to pretend I can uncivilize myself, or maybe I was never civilized enough to begin with; in any case, I can at least decide I’ll write no more books. Eight is enough, and they are a big trouble, and troubling, and hard to take down. Civilization is a form of living that includes books, but one can live happily without being a reader or a writer.
I’ve never put much stock in ancestry. My mother said her maiden name, though spelled differently, came from Anne Boleyn, the beheaded queen. That would make for an interesting answer on a medical form to the question, how did your ancestor die? Today’s medical forms often ask for information related to questions of genetics, presumably to help with diagnosis, but what’s wrong is still often just a guess, but lots of afflictions do carry useful genetic information. At the same time, some consideration might be given to mutations and the idea that at the cellular level some form of intelligence or at least some form of communication between or among cells, in plants and animals, informs protective changes.
In the military, forms, identified by letters and numbers, such as the popular “DD Form 214” (DD for Department of Defense), carry orders, instructions, information. An Army is a form of military organization, and etymologically, the word army suggests to form, fit together, join, as one makes and makes use of tools.
In high school, we learned to fill out forms. A popular question on those forms was “Father’s Occupation.” This might have been a precursor to the genetic questions on today’s medical forms. It might also help explain my being predisposed against interest in ancestry – though I would respond differently to such forms and questions today than I did when in high school. High school is a form of education, but in time the content wears thin, grows obsolete, while the form calcifies one’s entire being.
Of history, Joyce in “Ulysses” has Stephen tell his principal, Mr. Deasy, it’s “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Many of us might say the same of high school – a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. Stephen, in conversation with Deasy:
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
We’re still in episode two, “Nestor,” when Stephen makes the joke about a pier being “a disappointed bridge.” His students don’t seem to understand. Stephen is thinking of forms:
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
Cuneiform, Uniform, Reformatory.
We might find something a bit morbid in recalling the ancient forms. No, I’m not too interested in ancestry, but somewhat (so. me. so. what). But to call out some ghost you don’t really know, yet a relation, still: from referre ‘bring back’ – see relate: couple with.
—Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.
Joyce’s Buck Mulligan is in some form more interesting and certainly more fun than his Stephen Dedalus, even as Stephen is stand-in for Joyce himself. Stephen might be too given over to thinking about forms, while Buck more given to thinking about the form of suds atop his pint. Then again, Stephen is not Joyce, but an interesting form of.
I was still in high school when my father was buried in an under-road big pipe project cave-in. The forms used to shore the walls of the deep ditch gave way, and he was pinned under a dump of dirt and against the cement pipe. He was rescued with seven broken ribs and some skin abrasions, a form of occupational hazard.
In Percival Everett’s “James,” we read Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” overdubbed with newly invented first person narration by Twain’s character Jim, who becomes the protagonist, changing his name to James – “Just James,” he introduces himself at the end, when asked what his last name is. Or maybe, in Everett’s telling, James is his last name, and his first name is Just.
Huck becomes a secondary main character, a deuteragonist. “James” is not the first book to take a foil character from another book and reverse foils. Mark Twain did it himself when Huck, who first appears in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” becomes the narrator of his own story. The full title of Huck’s work is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade).”
The antagonist remains the same as in the Mark Twain book James comes from: slavery in the US mid 19th Century – or more specifically, slave traders or sellers, owners, and others benefiting or attempting to leverage for some advantage from the arrangement. In one of many ironic ideas in “James,” James and his friend Norman come up with a plan: sell James, James escapes, sell James again, repeat again and again as they move north – the idea first suggested to James by the Duke of Duke and Dauphin infame, here presented as far more evil than in Twain. They are brought nearby, and the slapstick is not funny. The early chapters of Everett’s book more closely follow Twain’s narrative than the later chapters, where we find new adventures of James and his reflections on what’s happening to him, why, and what can he possibly do about it as the book spirals into fantastical end chase scenes.
But Everett might have left James without a surname to underscore the existential adventure James embarks upon when he decides to leave his wife and child when he hears of his owner’s intent to sell him downriver; if sold he fears he’ll be separated from his family never to see his wife or child again. But to be without a surname is to be free from predispositions, assumptions, or any kind of argument about who you are or might be, where you come from or where you might be going. Language is a primary theme of “James,” as is writing and reading, and to give names to people, places, things, is to establish their reality, particularly if named via writing:
“My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I had been told or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars. I admire those who, at five years of age, like Venture Smith, can remember the clans of their ancestors, their names and the movements of their families through the wrinkles, trenches and chasms of the slave trade. I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.
With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”
Percival Everett, “James,” Doubleday, 2024, p. 93 (italics in original).
What does James mean by “self-related,” and what does it mean to be “self-written“? And how do the two terms differ? He doesn’t mention self-published, or any kind of publishing, and how he might have to rewrite, edit, embellish his story to get it published. But he seems to feel it is published as soon as he writes it down. Self-written. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” begins differently. We’re six paragraphs in before we learn Huck’s name, which we get indirectly, from the Widow Douglas. Huck begins by telling us we don’t know about him unless we’ve read “Tom Sawyer,” which contains some lies, Huck says, which doesn’t matter, everyone lies, he says. James presumably will not lie, not to his reader.
To be a writer is to make choices, to string together those choices. The above quote, from page 93 of “James,” is a rewrite of an earlier draft:
Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote:
“I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
p. 55.
Huck is not much given to such reflections in his book. That’s not why he writes. Maybe he’s too young yet. Why does he write? He simply jumps in and rambles on, telling of things as they happen, his eye for detail and ear for dialog both as acute as an owl’s. He doesn’t recognize or reveal his indebtedness to his creator, but he does mention him:
“That book [Tom Sawyer] was made by Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Huck has no need to lie to his reader. He’s enough to relate without lying.
James’s use of the term self-related could be a reference to the autobiography of Venture Smith, mentioned above in the quote from “James” page 93. Smith’s self-account begins as follows:
“The following account of the life of VENTURE, is a relation of simple facts, in which nothing is in substance to what he relates himself. Many other interesting and curious passages of his life might have been inserted, but on account of the bulk to which they must necessarily have swelled this narrative, they were omitted. If any should suspect the truth of what is here related, they are referred to people now living who are acquainted with most of the facts mentioned in this narrative.
The reader is here presented with an account, not of a renowned politician or warrior, but of an untutored African slave, brought into this Christian country at eight years of age, wholly destitute of all education but what he received in common with other domesticated animals, enjoying no advantages that could lead him to suppose himself superior to the beasts, his fellow servants. And if he shall enjoy no other advantage from perusing this narrative, he may experience those sensations of shame and indignation, that will prove him to be not wholly destitute of every noble and generous feeling.
The subject of the following pages, had he received only a common education, might have been a man of high respectability and usefulness; and had his education been suited to his genius, he might have been an ornament and an honor to human nature. It may perhaps, not be unpleasing to see the efforts of a great mind wholly uncultivated, enfeebled and depressed by slavery, and struggling under every disadvantage. The reader may here see a Franklin and a Washington, in a state of nature, or rather, in a state of slavery. Destitute as he is of all education, he still exhibits striking traces of native ingenuity and good sense.
This narrative exhibits a pattern of honesty, prudence, and industry, to people of his own colour; and perhaps some white people would not find themselves degraded by imitating such an example.
The following account is published in compliance with the earnest desire of the subject of it, and likewise a number of respectable persons who are acquainted with him.”
The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself, by Venture Smith.
That is not like the book Percival Everett is helping James to write. In any case, self-related might also refer to concepts or ideas of the self discussed by Kierkegaard. Percival Everett gives his reader homework assignments. James in dream reveries has discussions with Voltaire and Locke. Does the common reader simply gloss over these references? Google them? Do they provide argument for James’s own conclusions and rebuttals regarding economics, ethics, slavery? Are they meant to explain the behavior of Judge Thatcher, who presumably has read these same writers (James gets the books from the judge’s library)?
“Kierkegaard does not think of the human self predominantly as a kind of metaphysical substance, but rather more like an achievement, a goal to strive for. To be sure, humans are substances of a sort; they exist in the world, as do physical objects. However, what is distinctive about human selves is that the self must become what it is to become, human selves playing an active role in the process by which they come to define themselves.”
Language is the great theme of Percival Everett’s book. It’s about writing, what to write about and how. It’s about how people talk, often adopting or adapting a style they might think is suitable to their audience – or what they think their audience might want to hear. Language is marketing. Even when talking to ourselves, we might often feel like we’re selling something, or being sold something. The rhetorical flourishes in “James” both stir the emotions and logically persuade; and who can argue with James’s first hand ethos reliable and credible experience? James is a statement, a claim, to which there can be no rebuttal. His backing is impervious. Percival seems to want to write (as James does) something of both human affairs (history) and economic activity (industry). When James kidnaps Judge Thatcher, the judge asks James three times over the course of several pages, “Why are you talking like that?” – referencing James speaking out of the expected slave-speak language and instead using the judge’s own language. The judge can’t get over it, can’t understand, is utterly confused by James’s ability to speak out of (what the judge believes to be) character. James’s rhetorical skills mean, for one thing, the judge’s view of James has been and remains wrong. The foundation of his excuse for slavery is undermined, and he caves in on himself, though he keeps acting like a judge. In terms of the dual language scenario Everett has created, the judge might just as well be suddenly talking to an alien. He is talking to an alien.
While language is the great theme of “James,” the pencil is the great symbol. James at one point thinks he’ll adopt the last name of FABER, it being stamped on the stub he’s using:
“I studied the small stick that had cost so much. I had no way of knowing whether Young George’s beating had stopped short of his death. I knew I owed it to him to write something important. The pencil lead was soft and made a dark mark. I resolved to use it with a light touch to have it last as long as possible. Stamped on it was the name FABER. Perhaps that would be my last name. James Faber. That didn’t sound too bad.”
p. 102.
Did Percival Everett consider putting the name THOREAU on the pencil, after Henry David Thoreau’s father’s pencil making company, where Henry worked a good part of his life? The pencil appears again and again during James’s journey, almost always at a cost incommensurate with its size and weight and feel. If symbol, what does the pencil stand for? If you’re going to write, as James wants to, you need an implement, and paper, which James also acquires though not quite at the same cost as the pencil. The pencil is a tool. We would probably discard without thinking twice a pencil already whittled down to the stub size of the one James holds on to almost to the end. The feel of the pencil in his pocket gives him comfort, he says. Later, he notes the pencil has “survived.” Others have not.
But note how quickly James seems to move from the sacrifice of Young George for the pencil to thinking some more about choosing his name. James has the ego of a writer. Huck had a story to tell, but he had no aspirations of becoming a writer. Ironically, Huck has no use for books, in Twain or in Everett. Can books make you good? Is reading sublime? Is James a good man or a good character or both or neither, or does that matter? He wants out of his birth predicament. What he wants is not arcane: he wants to live in peace and independence and freedom with his family. Notably not included in Everett’s version is the scene in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” where Jim scolds his daughter for leaving a door open, asks her to close it, and when she ignores him, he hits her, only to discover she can’t hear. She didn’t hear him telling her to close the door. Twain’s Jim feels the remorse of pathos, and we feel it too as he recalls the event to Huck. Would a similar scene, if included in “James,” come before or after the “Papa, Papa, Papa,” that comes at the end of Everett’s chase? Writers make choices because they have choices. That’s the reason James wants to become a writer. Slavery can’t prevent James from writing.
“James” is full of sarcasm, wit, irony, satire – but it’s not humor as Twain wrote humor. For example, at the end of “James,” Graham, the evil owner of a slave breeding plantation, upon being rousted out of his house to find his cornfield ablaze and his slaves in revolt and escaping, his overseer dead on the ground, James’s gun in his face, says, “What in tarnation?” Really? Tarnation? Isn’t that a clown’s word, an alteration, euphemism, for damnation? Is tarnation what Graham would have said? But it was a word used circa 1850’s, as indicated by Google’s Ngram analysis:
Use over time for: tarnation
And, note, tarnation is making a resurgence.
Or does Percival have Graham say tarnation to mock him before James shoots and kills him? Is its use in “James” intended as humor? Graham has no idea, as Judge Thatcher did not, not clue one, of what’s happening. Tarnation, indeed.
I stepped in front of him. “Who the hell are you?” I pointed my pistol at him. “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,” I said. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.” I pulled back the hammer on my pistol. “What in tarnation?” He cocked his weapon.
p. 302.
Maybe it’s farce? A pun? It’s a mixture. Depends on how you hear it, not necessarily on how it’s said – not necessarily the same as how it’s said. But James (the word, Biblical) means supplanter. While James professes no interest in the God of his oppressors, he clearly knows the Bible.
When Mark Twain’s Huck decides to help Jim, an illegal immigrant of his time, a runaway slave, Huck believes he’ll go to hell for his goodness. Huck knows that by helping Jim escape he’ll be breaking the law. He’ll bring the wrath of local public opinion so forcefully down upon his head, this time it’ll probably fall off. He feels good, though, having sat down and thought it out and making his decision to help Jim with deliberation and good reason. Huck does not argue that he should not go to hell for helping Jim.
Central to Ed Simon’s 100 page immersion in goodness is a discussion of Judas, who betrayed Jesus. It’s a little forced, but the idea is that without the betrayal, Jesus can’t save the world. One would think the Grand Master of Plots would come up with a work-around if Judas doesn’t cooperate, but we get the idea. Out of this betrayal, for which Judas knows he’ll go to hell, where his 30 pieces of silver won’t buy him much of anything, comes the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. So why has Judas, over time, been treated as such a heel?
For Simon, goodness is no easy matter. When Jesus said, “Come, follow me,” you knew you were not going to a party. Is goodness even possible for an embodied, fallen soul? Where along the spectrum from doing good to doing nothing to breaking bad does empathy require altruistic behavior? In other words, what good is it if you don’t have some skin in the game? Simon clarifies the question in his introduction:
“Looming over my concerns is clearly the current political climate in both Europe and the United States, particularly the increasing economic disparity, the emboldening of extremism and zealotry, and especially the casual cruelty. The desire to reflect on what goodness might mean and how to be an embodied individual implicated in systems of oppression who nonetheless wishes to stand against those systems is hopefully underscored through the entire book” (8).
from Intro. to “Furnace of This World; Or, 36 Observations About Goodness,” by Ed Simon, Zero Books, 2019.
Why does it sometimes seem easier to follow evil than good? Easier to describe and to write. Good comedy is much harder to write, and more rare, than good tragedy. And why does comedy so often rely on someone else’s pain? Any discussion of good and evil falls quickly into the Western dichotomy zone, where so much bad would not have befallen you had you simply been more good. It’s not as easy as choosing right over wrong when any choice implicates others and sets forth what might quickly become a random course of events over which you just as quickly lose control. You make a good shot, but unfortunately you end up sinking the 8 ball and give away the match. Simon is aware of that, and handles it carefully:
“I neither know what is right or wrong, nor how to prove which one a given action is, but I do know fear, anxiety, pain, relief, peace, love, and the visceral, physical, psychological experience of those states, and that must be the basis for any ethic of goodness to our fellow humans” (14).
Goodness begins, for Simon, with compassion. But can the good one does redeem one who does not? Is there a quorum of good necessary to save those not in attendance? Why does the Black Christ keep getting whitewashed over? Simon does not go it alone in navigating his theme. What good would a totalitarian good be? What does it mean to sin for good? As Dylan sang, “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.” A little kindness for those who fail might be a good place to begin a path toward goodness.
While his Judas discussion might seem a bit forced, so too do some of Simon’s examples of evil seem extreme. They are the tabloid stories that have gone historically viral. But they are carefully placed to support the claim that evil is not a mistake. Depravity does not necessarily follow from deprivation, contrary to social studies myth:
“My Daddy beats my Mommy My Mommy clobbers me My Grandpa is a Commie My Grandma pushes tea My sister wears a mustache My brother wears a dress Goodness Gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!
from “Gee, Officer Krupke,” lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, “West Side Story,” 1957.
In fact, goodness might come from poverty, the road of excess not leading to Blake’s “palace of wisdom,” but to a white house of exploitation and gluttony, avarice and vainglory. The swamp might be a necessary mess.
“I apologize for the macabre nature of my observations,” Simon begins observation XXIV, “but any discussion of good implies a consideration of evil” (60). Apology accepted as we read on, for by the end of his observations, I was gobsmacked by this book. It is perfectly paced and accessible to the common reader. It’s full of researched materials from antiquity to modern times, but it’s scholarly without being pedantic or smugly academic. It does not pander to a peer group. Yet it could be used as a guide toward further reading, study, caring. It contains both the sacred and the profane. It does not preach nor profess nor confess nor hide.
Is happiness necessary to goodness? Studies over the last two decades have shown Americans are not a happy bunch. Could it be that’s because we are not sufficiently good to be really happy? Simon anticipates rebuttal. Each observation carries forward naturally and thematically. He’s not without contradictions. We learn of Margery Kempe and her autobiography. We meet, if we’ve not already, the poet Jack Gilbert. Kempe says, “Wheresoever God is, heaven is; and God is in your soul, and many an angel is round about your soul to guard it both night and day” (80). But if God is in your soul, why does it need protecting, protection from what? Protection from the world He created for you? Is that how religion came to be such a protection racket? Meanwhile, we’ve Jack Gilbert telling us “we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants” (78). Then why didn’t God make life more enjoyable, the cynic responds. But Simon stops the merry-go-round: “We laugh and enjoy and smile not in spite of the suffering implicit in all life, we laugh and enjoy and smile because of that suffering. We laugh and enjoy and smile not because we are inhuman, we laugh and enjoy and smile because we are human” (78).
Simon’s human examples of goodness are not so tabloid as his examples of evil. From Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Flannery O’Connor, from Augustine through Judas to Margaret Edson’s W;t, to Kempe and Nietzsche and on to Fr Mychal, 911’s “Victim 0001,” whose last act of love signalled that God does not hate us, we learn, if nothing else, why we are given goodness.
Simon has written a good book. We learn about the things that make poetry: kindness, fellowship, pencils. “Such is the kernel of resistance, the ethic of kindness and delight, to ‘accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world,’” Simon says, the “ruthless furnace” bit coming from Jack Gilbert (79). Simon’s last observation, number XXXVI, is a brilliant, modern version of the Lord’s Prayer, a way to think about goodness.
In the middle of Adam Gopnik’s explanation of Lawrence Buell’s reading preferences informed by historical setting (New Yorker, “Go Giants: A new survey of the Great American Novel,” 21 Apr, 104), there’s an ambiguity, whether caused by Buell, Adam Gopnik, or both, I’m not sure, but Gopnik says Buell thinks Huck helping Jim escape is a less radical act in the eighteen-eighties, after slavery has already been abolished. The argument is made in the context of a comparison to Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published in 1852, an inferior work, according to Buell, but one, the argument continues, that Mark Twain must have read in order to write his better book. That’s probable, but while “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was published in the US in 1885, Twain set Huck and Jim’s story in “The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to fifty years ago,” before the Civil War and before Stowe’s book. Would a common reader in 1885 have understood the costs to a kid of deciding against the values of his immediate, local culture “forty to fifty years ago”? The answer to that question seems vital to Buell’s method of reading literature.
A common mishap reading any text occurs when readers confuse the author with the narrator. And often, indeed, writers struggle separating themselves from their narrator, trying to turn memoir into fiction, unwittingly revealing more about themselves than they intend. But crafty authors often deliberately create unreliable narrators. The lying or self-deluded narrator is most easily detected in the first person, but hidden behind the credible screen of the third person omniscient narrator, an author may still turn deceitful, sleight of hand tricks. And authors, too, often suffer from self-delusions. This isn’t so much about how literature works as how the making of literature works. But either way, readers may be easily confused. But how does that confusion matter to the reading of a text open to multiple possibilities?
Buell thinks it’s important that readers understand something of the times of the author; or does he mean the times of the character the author created? Either way, a reader who knows something of the setting of a novel will no doubt read it differently than a reader unfamiliar with the novel’s setting. But there’s another problem: how does a reader come to know settings of the past? Through narratives, some of which may be unreliable, even if cast in the non-fiction mode. And even if reliable, history is constantly undergoing revision. How does historical revisionism impact the reading of literature?
But the question of whether or not readers in 1885 understood Huck’s predicament given the novel’s setting is an important one. It’s a question we might ask of any number of literary works. Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1957), for example, gets a new reading with each new generation of readers, but the further we get from the so called Beat Generation, the more we might need other works surveying the period of the work’s setting – a good companion piece to “On the Road” is “Go” (1952) by John Clellon Holmes. How readers respond to a narrative is dependent on many variables. Non-Catholics, for example, are likely to read Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” differently than Catholics, and Catholics who actually attended Catholic schools will read it differently again.
Where is the reader who brings no experience or expectation whatsoever to a text? They just might be the author’s best target audience. And likewise, why wouldn’t readers search for that very book, the experience about which they know nothing?
Henry’s loon waltzed into the room laughing
laughing laughing at the phony moon
rising over the pond-like screen
laughing at Henry, at me, and at you too
who scorned the whippoorwilled
who loon-waltzed our way across the fall season
who tweeted twitted twisted and tallyhoed on
but what stilled the waters the antithesis of laughter
came the calm call of the whippoorwill
calling up to the ballooning moon
to Henry, Huck, Hank, and all of us who
waltzing across a lightbox screen
click click click the path of the reen
and fail to see the turn of the season
while flashes YouTube and you too
laughing laughing laughing
at the simple simple single moon
who waltzes with the whippoorwill
to the epizeuxises of the whippoorwill
the yoke on me preening for the screening
in a full no half no quarter no moon
in the turning turning turning of the seasons
as the lone loon laughs
at Henry, Huck, Hank, me, and you too
yes at you too you too you too
whistles the only whippoorwill
as the moon falls fades the laugh
and across the pond fills the screen
white going going gone the season
of the wry loon waltzing with the moon
with the dry improbably wry moon
then on the far shore you too
out of rhyme out of sync out of season
running running running for the whippoorwill
and across the pond comes a single scream
that echoes epizootically laughing
out of season the waltzing singing loon
laughing woo hoo! woo hoo! woo hoo!
the poor loon waltz in a pale fall screen
“…and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d ‘a’ knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t ‘a’ tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before” (Huckleberry Finn, last sentences).
The Coming of the Toads 