Arrowhead

Abstract

Arrowhead Robert Farrell To make the wrong choice the right choice and the right choice the wrong choice takes courage. And say the work justifies all. Even so, that leaves out the pain of others, the suicides direct and indirect, and the fact that where the piazza should have gone rain will someday fall and tourists with umbrellas will walk near trees, each a sapling once, today grown, their tall trunks black with rain, and that a turn of the head towards a garden without a fountain, past a hedge to where the lawn, now mown by volunteers, will reveal a kind of ideal if fictive love, [End Page 103] whose consequents are proud docents and a collection of scrimshaw, W. E. B. DuBois’ childhood rocking chair (a seat we know the small boy sat on), a couch discovered at Smith College, and a desk, itself real enough, but not the one that faced both fear and doubt before a window through which a whale is still hidden in a mountain in a cloud. [End Page 104] Robert Farrell Lehman College Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press and the Melville Society