THE CROP-DUSTER, ALABAMA It’s evening; the windows are tinted: I’ve seldom seen such landscape from a bus, enchanting shades of green, without a gloss; so leafy, “leafy” is what I’ve printed in my letter—that was the adjective with which I conveyed this peculiar state’s fullness, a cornucopia of traits flowing through this leafiness like a sieve. Two radios play, one of them is heard; not bothering with headphones in front of me, a man as if to anoint has his head down, like a sea-alighting bird. In back, the reflections merged in the glass, both of us watching the crop-duster pass. EXPEDITION Walking in fisherman’s boots all the way to the fence, deer hindquarters flash and thrash through the thorns, and gluey spider webs break against my innocent face; crows maul the sky with their cries and then, silent as pine needles snapping underfoot, the give-way of a rotten trunk next to those towers of those who live in the mud and my own subsidence, rubbery, sodden; scraping off on a root, nailed boards reveal a blue canopied treehouse— not the first in my sunny youth; at the fence I rest in the sundown, enervated in the cacophony of gloom and transfixed by the motes floating in the high-vaulted clearing.
David Francis has produced seven music albums, Always/Far: a chapbook of lyrics and drawings, and Poems from Argentina (Kelsay Books). He has written and directed the films, Village Folksinger
(2013) and Memory Journey (2018). He lives in New York City.
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