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Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Bric-a-Brac
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Doorbell Press
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published in Diagram, September 2025
Crusoe
We say was
‘Rescued.’
—George Oppen
1
On April 14, 1890, the First Assistant Postmaster General in Washington D.C. receives paperwork “for the application of a post office” in an unincorporated hamlet with the gnomic name “Trulls.” It belongs to James R. Trull. With care the application has been filled out—“The name of the nearest creek is Cold. ”; the new office “will be on or near route No. 13134 ”; and on the line marked “Postmaster” printed the name “James R. Trull.” But where Trull had written “Cold Mountain,” the First Assistant Postmaster General strikes through his choice and reaches down to the margin, selecting from the list of alternatives written at the bottom. “If we cannot get the above proposed name,”Trull has scrawled at the bottom of the page, “we will suggest Gerly. Pless. Ivester. Cruso.” The what. As reported in the 1941 North Carolina Writers Project: “CRUSO, 2,900 alt., 15* pop.; Haywood Co.; est. 1885; named by the first postmaster, who had just read Robinson Crusoe.”
2
As winter begins to gather in the West, and the Donner Party 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 exhausted pioneers give him the name of the day, “Thursday.” “The color of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians, and Virginians, and other natives of America are,” Crusoe had written, and taken Friday as a servant. “Thursday” helps the pioneers set camp, puts out a grass fire and what, but in the morning the party rises to see he has stolen off with two of their oxen: “…Had 2 oxen taken by 2 Indians that Cam with us all day.” The oxen are a minor problem; his name represents one more errant detail in the grave miscalculation that will keep the group lingering in the Truckee Meadows, as the snow deepens on Donner Pass, and the group lurches toward their place among the historical dead. The date was not the 4th but the 5th of October—already Friday.
3
After leaving his home, expeditions, Robinson Crusoe encounters one more named character, a Moorish child named “Xury.” He and sells him back into servitude. Defoe gives him the unusual name “Xury”: perhaps a variant spelling of the name “Khoury,” out of place but with loaded meaning, popular among Arabophobe Christians; or else it may have been an utter exoticist invention. Regardless does it wash up on foreign shores. In Ohio, Xury Gingery lived a “clean, wholesome, upright” life. In Wisconsin, Xury Williams marked his cattle with “a square crop off the right ear.” In Greenville, a Xury West was born in 1796. When he came of age he set out north-west, settling his way through Indiana on a westward line, until he reached south-eastern Iowa, its earliest settler, and platted, like a memory, a town named Greenville. He became what; what; his homestead became a beacon on the Mormon Trace, “the emigrant wagons, with their white canvas, drawn in a circle around the cabin and the horses picking the prairie grass.” When he died what. His name begat two more. The first was his son’s, “Xury A. West.” Xury A. died in the combat, his destiny a manifest of the Mexican-American war. The other was his nephew, “Xury E. West.” Xury E. died near Marion. 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 reported. “His mind was unbalanced on account of financial embarrassment.”
4
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular