VERSE:
Jacobsen:, Bob Cording, Josephine
BOB CORDING WATER-WALKER Note: The title is taken from the nickname of the purple gallinule, a common Southern marsh bird. It has the color of sky after storm or clean ocean under bright sun....
...JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN A TRAVELER TOLD ME A traveler told me of a tribe in Bali who honor in a festival, petal, poem, carved wood, and paint, and, with the wreath perfect, and the feathers, the colors spoken out, with the poem, and wood, done, let these go where others in a like ceremony on this day have gone: burn them...
...does not turn back nor go down...
...Burn wood, words, colors: purifying the shifty desire to keep a comment on the lips of hoarders...
...Give fire what cannot be kept or lost...
...Preserved like some believing Christian in a story, it rises firmly on water...
...From rank lily to lily, it walks lightly over languorous water, nodding and bowing like a dove past the coiled muscles of cottonmouth and the thick flesh of alligator...
...sifts through mud unstained...
...disregards even me, its witness, who for a time is extended something to uphold...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 9
