( via / me )

The Liberty Tower at the National World War I Museum.

“The Spell

You can almost see him, looking as if well,
Shedding it, shaking it off,
The least shadow on the shoulders
Marking the hurt–as if absorbed almost;
Then the face turning, alive–

Only hesitating momentarily–

Until you remember how the head
Was horribly shattered
And fell, with the lifted hair,
As from an ax in back–Oswald
Cutting a path for himself
In the midst of America, a wedge;

But was the thing as it sped,
Coppered, leaden, not stopped
Perhaps there in the invincible thick hair?
Where the woman with her skill
Could pick it away, in her lap,
Breaking the spell? in the cloth of her dress–

It was deeper than that;
Neither burr nor dune thistle,
Nor like the roses she held
Black as blood in the light, so dark red–
But a kind of blunt bud, splintered
Into flower, that could not be touched,
Having its own final force that spread throughout,
The blind dark overwhelming him.”

–William Burford, A Beginning (1966) [The only poem i have been able to find by a Dallas poet contemporaneous with the Kennedy Assassination]

Lexical gaps.

“Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.” –Loren Eiseley

The old Central Library in Downtown Dallas.