James Finnegan
Just enough of snow
For a boy’s finger to write
His name on the porch.
How to write, to own
one’s name in a white world?
Bashō, Busson and Issa, save him.
He is fed up with racism, sick
and tired, sick to the point of death
with amoebic dysentery.
Like the Magi, come to his door,
to a poor farmhouse he’s bought
in the French countryside. Nature abounds
around him, yet it closes in around him.
He is fed up with his mail being read,
with the HUAC show trials.
Bashō, Busson and Issa, watch over him, Richard Wright is lost in France,
financial circumstances forcing him
to sell the farmhouse, to move
his family to an apartment in Paris, driven
by paranoia perhaps. Because of his politics
they’re spying on him. Paranoia
in Paris is nothing new, harbor of exiles,
haven for lost artists. Then home calls,
a telegram: Mother is dead. Stop.
Somehow a whole novel
awaits one in any small ambit of words.
Bashō, Busson and Issa, give him
a way to live out his last days.
A man leaves his house
And walks around his winter fields
And then goes back in.