A Spectacular Reformation of Their Old Ways

Abstract

A Spectacular Reformation of Their Old Ways Miriam Bird Greenberg (bio) They’ve gone down to Honey Grove, are living in an abandoned house. One of them’s strung up a wire spliced into the electric line, and the lights flicker all night like heat lightning, like angels playing a trick. They have a few plates, drink from mason jar mugs, it’s not for long, they know, but this is downright civilized: breakfast at a table with a bedsheet for tablecloth, a spectacular reformation of their old ways. On the falling-in porch with moth-shadows swimming on their faces they wonder aloud what happened to the old white man at the Salvation Army lunch up in Idaho who could speak to space aliens. He stayed on Blackfoot land, but spent the week in town begging day-old pastries from bakeries to dole out to the dentists who’d pro bonoed his gold teeth inlaid with rubies. He’d told them, Why didn’t they settle down, get jobs at Walmart, start a family? Here’s as nice a place as any, he’d said, handing them a sheaf of newspaper clippings, documents of his fame and fortune. They’d hung around the library all day chasing off patrons with their unlaced shoes souring the air, slept in a doorway and dreamt [End Page 63] of sparkling cities. The flickering heavens reeled one innumerable self after another past their closed eyes, but lo, they never learn. At dawn again they were cadging coffee, then kicking moss on the shoulder of the highway with their thumbs out; but—Oh, Spain. They had a book with pictures of Sevilla, the Alhambra, the Canary Islands—it was stamped pocatello public library, and soon they’d lay eyes on those sparkling shores, birds yellow as the sunlight one of them said dreamily—but no, said the other, it was dogs, loping black dogs the Spaniards had meant, and they howled their consternation like men all night at the invaders. [End Page 64] Miriam Bird Greenberg The recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, MIRIAM BIRD GREENBERG is currently working on an ethnographically derived poetry project about economic migrants living in Hong Kong. Her book In the Volcano’s Mouth won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and has just been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.* Copyright © 2016 University of North Carolina Wilmington