Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Bric-a-Brac
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Doorbell Press
Contact
published in Diagram, 2026
1
“We feel it was ourselves who live through history,” George Oppen wrote, “No other people do?” He turns to the image of Robinson Crusoe. “Crusoe,” he writes,
We say was
‘Rescued’.
2
On April 14, 1890, the First Assistant Postmaster General in Washington D.C. approved the paperwork “for the application of a post office” at a location named “Trulls,” buried deep in the woods of North Carolina. Carefully, Trull has filled in the Post Office Request Application, what, and signed his own name on the line, but where he offers the name “Cold Mountain,” the First Assistant Postmaster General strikes it through and reaches down to the margin. “If we cannot get the above proposed name,” Trull has scrawled at the bottom of the form, “we will suggest Gerly. Pless. Ivester. Cruso.” The last still stands. As reported in 1941: “CRUSO, 2,900 alt., 15* pop.; Haywood Co.; est. 1885; named by the first postmaster, who had just read Robinson Crusoe.”
3
As winter begins to gather in the West, and the Donner Party gathers around the Humboldt River, preparing for a final, desperate exertion against the snow, a lone Paiute joins their depleting wagon train. Remembering the story of Robinson Crusoe and his man, “Friday,” the weary emigrants give him the name of the day, “Thursday.” Thursday helps them set camp, rescuing their wagons, that evening, from a grass fire, but in the morning the group rises to find he has stolen off with two of their oxen. “Had 2 oxen taken by 2 Indians that Cam with us all day,” James Reed writes. The yoke is a minor trouble; it is his name, “Thursday,” that will keep them lingering in the Truckee Meadows a few days longer, as the snow deepens on Donner Pass, and the nation prepares for them a place among its historical dead. The date was not October 1st but September 29th: a Tuesday.
4
meets a Moorish child named Xury. “Xury, if you will be faithful to me, I’ll make you a great man; but if you will not stroke your face to be true to me,” Crusoe tells him, “I must throw you into the sea too.” Of the name there are no precedents in the English record. Perhaps it is a variant spelling of “Khoury,” borrowed from Levantine Christians, or the invention of Defoe’s exoticism. Regardless does it wash up on foreign shores. In Wisconsin, a “Xury Williams” marks his cattle with “a square crop off the right ear.” In Ohio, “Xury Gingery” lives a “clean, wholesome, upright” life. In 1796 a child is born in Greenville, South Carolina, and named “Xury West.” When he comes of age, he follows the compass of his surname to southeastern Iowa, where, like a memory, he plats a town named Greenville. To his hearth will flock the emigrant wagons of the Mormon Trace, “with their white canvas, drawn in a circle around the cabin and the horses picking the prairie grasses,” where his name will drift a tide farther. His son, “Xury A. West,” will die on the border in the Mexican-American War. His nephew, “Xury E. West,” will live and die in Indiana. He “committed suicide yesterday at his home in New Winchester by hanging. Three months since he made the attempt by taking poison,” the Indiana State Sentinel reports. “His mind was unbalanced on account of financial embarrassment.”
5
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
“I speak of the things I see, and that I see everyday,” George Oppen wrote, “because my life is led among them, because I have no life free from them, and must obviously find meaning in them if I am to find meaning. at all.”