Quiet jetty

  A breakwater, possibly the allusion drawing

  Roosevelt to plant trees to hold the land in

  the first worst hard time, in lieu of pursu-

  ing advice to adopt soils management by sci-

  entific scruples, comes to mind in the pres-

  ent worst hard time, a dust bowl degradation

  of the framework of community, the language.

  The clean white shirt, possibly an allusion

  to a breakwater, is resorted to repeatedly,

  rather, for its porosity, permeability, clar-

  ity, coherency, and transparent antecedents.

  This gives a taste for it, generic as it is.

  I think of soils management these days, as a

  friend was writing to me only the other day,

  to do: you can defend, simply by reading a

  poem. This I hadn't discovered I'd known to

  do, until I glanced again at prose just now,

  so steeped in Scott Fitzgerald, that it had

  held in ground and flowered, another season -

          Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him,

          and they ran until they reached a side street muf-

          fled and sweet with trees. As they leaned together,

          panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets,

          and she knew, quite as though she'd seen it done,

          that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss

          traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and

          she crushed their coolness against her cheek.

Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time
  The untold story of those
  who survived the great
  American dust bowl
Houghton Mifflin, 2006©


Truman Capote
Summer Crossing
ca 1959
op. posth.
The Truman Capote
  Literary Trust
Random House, 2006©