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FLORIDA, NOAH’S SON
The Florida Anthology, University of Florida Press, 2025
Caution! Wet floor! The Sherwin-Williams logo
is a bucket of paint
pouring over the
world.
The can is on the porch
and Dad is walking the lake,
hands blue.
Just as well
from the kitchen window
And sleep.
I dream of the flood
under an elk head mounted on the wall.
(My hand in water
is a stone)
POINT OF ROCKS
Once I saw Pike’s Peak across the plains
and felt our smallness
was,
in) His textures, His glass eyes
or at least their hard branches
Just a small coin, brilliant
and lawed and
Here
it is.
What George Washington Did
This morning I phone my mother about a job offer.
You are great at gathering information, she says.
That’s what George Washington did.
—
Once, in the woods near Great Meadows,
Washington, at twenty-two,
through Night as dark as Pitch,
joined with the Half-King, Tanarghisson,
to surround a group of French Canadians
camped, Forty some, in a sculking place
to reconnoitre the Country, Roads, Creeks&ca to Potomack,
just rousing, at 7 A.M.,
when Col. Washington gave the Word for all his Men to fire,
two volleys,
killd 10, wounded one and took 21 Prisoner’s,
including Monsieur De Jumonville the Commander, We killed,
against desires,
Mr. de Jumonville having told them to desist,
that he had something to tell them,
claimed the French,
killed by a Musket-shot in the Head whilst reading his Summons
one of the Half-King’s men reported,
though John Shaw, private,
had heard it was Tanarghisson, with Tomahawk,
who split the Head of the French Captan,
then took his Brains
and washed his Hands with them
and then scalped him,
while Washington stood, remonstrating on the hill,
as once, as a boy,
he had copied into his notebook the last Rule of Civility,
number 110,
LABOUR to keep alive in your Breast
that Little Spark of Celestial fire
called Conscience,
swearing to Dinwiddie that he had heard no shouts at all,
the absurdity of the pretext too glaring,
and the admission of guilt, signed at Fort Necessity,
confessing, in French,
to l’assasinat of Sieur du Jumonville,
he blames on his interpreter
Jacob Van Braam,
misunderstanding the terms,
imprisoned six years in Canada,
while Washington,
in a letter to his brother,
says that he heard bullets whistle,
and, believe me,
there is something charming in the sound.
—
She is paragraphing from a book.