574
PARTISAN REVIEW
me. I was so afraid of the beauty I found out that I began to run
and run from it until I melted down into this death. Can you learn
anything from this?
"Somewhere beyond all this muck and dreck there lies a pasture
of serenity and I will find it. I am on my way. Hang a wreath on the
door of this fallen house for me. How did I die? I invited Death.
Because I was so very weary. The rest is a secret never to be told
(see seven crows). Leave us alone and we will destroy ourselves
in
the end, but we will leave undestroyed our otherselves to breathe the
bridges of breath between our ruined and isolate islands.
"I am the Ur-Follie of many derivations of your time. Watch."
I watch and watch and watch, Follie, and I will build a bridge
between these ruined islands; then blow the bridge of breath away.
But the islands will remain forever like stone islands in a still and
frozen sea. For we are only breath to blow and bridge eternal ruins
while we breathe, until we are blown away.
At your funeral there was a feeling of doom in the Grace Meth–
odist Church, and I sat among my kin feeling dry and throttled in
the throat and thought we are all doomed, who are these, who am I,
what are we laying away, what splendid glittering sinful part of us
are we burying like a treasure in the earth?
The sermon was a long and sad one. It told about all the family,
about your young life in Charity and your work in the Church (once
you had stood, at ten, before the whole congregation and recited the
books of the Bible first forwards then backwards).
I want to make a little speech upon the passing of this boy, the
sermon said. We have lost a leaf from a beautiful old Charity tree
(a leaf! a leaf!). A bright star has fallen over Charity (a star! ). We
have lost a jewel (a sequin! a rhinestone! a parure of great price!),
a toy of the world (0 Jack-in-the-Box! ). This is a piece of the lavish
gay world brought back to Charity black earth, the daisy pollen of
the daisies of the world clings to his limbs brought home to this hive.
Weare burying the brightness of the world. We are burying like a
foul thing in the dirt this twisted freak, like Sue Emma's two little
monsters, little slobbering freaks with bloated watermelon heads, Sue
Emma's sins (and every day they'd come and measure ,and measure
. . . their heads were like Granny Ganchion's vile goitre, round and
swollen and strutted with purple veins big as a chicken's intestines).
