The Selvage

                           1

So door to door among the shotgun

shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in

our cleanest shirts and ma’am

and excuse me were all but second

nature now and this one woman comes

to the door she must have weighed

three hundred pounds Would you be

willing to tell us who you plan to vote

for we say and she turns around with

Everett who’re we voting for? The

black guy says Everett. The black guy

she says except that wasn’t the language

they used they used the word

we’ve all agreed to banish from even our

innermost thoughts, which is when

I knew he was going to win.

                           2

At which point the speaker discovers,

as if the lesson were new,

she has told the story at her own expense.

Amazing, said my sister’s chairman’s

second wife, to think what you’ve

amounted to considering where you’re from,

which she imagined was a compliment.

One country, friends. Where when

we have to go there, as, depend

upon it, fat or thin, regenerate

or blinkered-to-the-end, we shall,

they have to take us in. I saw

                           3

a riverful of geese as I drove home across

our one-lane bridge. Four hundred of them

easily, close-massed against the current and

the bitter wind (some settled on the ice) and just

the few at a time who’d loosen rank to

gather again downstream. As if

to paraphrase. The fabric

every minute bound

by just that pulling-out that holds

the raveling together. You were driving

all this time? said Steven. Counting

geese? (The snow falling into the river.)

No. (The river about

to give itself over to ice.) I’d stopped.

Their wingspans, had they not

been taking shelter here, as wide as we are tall.