"Flags
in the Un-Snoped Bear Dust" - David Oates
That proud, unvarnished head lying like a flag in the
dust, though not yet realizing what he should have known before he came into
the wisteria-ed sunporch among the poor old Negroes looking from their dark,
silent, ever malleable, never bending strength of servitude (and then the
rest--all of it at once as though someone had turned on the tap in the
horseyard and the water, cold, clear, rushing hard but not yet frozen in that
deep well, cracked the ice on the trough as the mule watched in skeptical
amazement), nor even stopping to think, but just falling and groping and trying
to fly like some bright comet in autumn, and that not really it either--wait,
wait!--but like that--but wait a minute--unique in its extreme of the old rebel
colonel great-grandfather doing foolish and wonderful things at Antietam with
his trousers unbuttoned, or even as his children fade into brick-box suburban
barbecue rotisseries, distinctive not even then, rushing, galloping, sliding,
across that incredible and unincompassable distance before the consummation of
the sentence.
(2013 photo by Michelle Castleberry)
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