so that's what it's all about

by

c.s.  giscombe



PRAIRIE STYLE                                                                                                        






A sexual image about the prairie ought to be a good idea: it'd have no 
meaning in a larger context and its existence, furiously local, might make
outline itself a high level of vernacular--the image might be the sum of 
dire and hopeless songs, more of an after-image really. Love 
might be, in general, a revelation but sex could have a shape 
or a figure with which one could remember it; the speaker could recognize
it or could himself cause recognition to occur. Love might be a terror--the hesitation past town--but sex could be content and outline both, until the 
watcher (or the listener) turns away.

Male, female. Black men say trim. An outline's sameness is, finally, a 
reference. Towns, at a distance, are that--how they appear at first, a 
dim cluster, and then from five or six miles off; how they look when
you're only three miles away. Inbetween sightings is the prairie itself
to get across: trek, trace, the trick of landscape. Love suffers its wish-
fulness--it's an allegorical value and the speaker mimes allegory with 
descriptions of yearning, like the prairie's joke on us (among us). In-
land's a name, a factory, something to say; the thing upon which the image verges, the thing push articulates