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11.06.18
From It Was Over There by That Place
There were parts I recognized.

I saw by night a man riding a red horse and he stood among the myrtle trees in the bottom and behind him were red horses, sorrel and white. My Lord what are these? The man that stood among the myrtle trees answered and said, These are they whom the Lord hath sent to walk to and fro through the earth (Zechariah 1:8).
 
Was the man standing in the myrtle trees riding or standing? Or both or neither and both? Or some other configuration of which was not said? Or with which said.

Maybe two men were there.

And how many horses unnumbered there? Were there other riders or only one man or two on a red horse going and walking? The other horses loose without riders. How could they take note of what they saw and how should they look for what was there to look for? How did they know what do with their words?  When not clear moved to back of class. Their schoolwork always wanting.

Why was the going of them sent to and fro to find the reports to the Lord who was everywhere at once but possibly he stayed by the horses. The beings of the world in that place over there to be seeing what there in the way of seeing was.

Watching horses of what they reported.
Horses with reports going forth to report what they saw given.
He was standing or riding or standing riding or riding standing.
The other horses—how to take notes without hands to write without scroll unrolling without punctuation as it was early written.  And pen and ink and satchel all horses needed a rider for that to be answered and said.


 



Was not anything made that was made (John 1:3).

A cat on the edge of water. A group of fish called school. What I was was broken from the disparate pieces fishing in the river. The lake. The stream of being. My brother caught a fish. It was early in the fish-catching program they forwarded. What is there is not of it now. But a vehicle for travel. Separated in parts as fish in the water. Most of them gone or swimming as fish swim together and apart in the river. The strike of old ways. Wave lines on the flat rock by the shore. The Lakota believe their language was created when their people were (Facebook, “Native Hope,” March 31, 2017).  It was the same on the trail I was there after. I had to speak from different places in different ways to find where it scattered. Waiting from where I was. I could follow where they knew I was. It’s still the light by my fingers moving.


 



The history of bowling was found in stickball games.

The ring-pull on the window shade was the first hole in the bowling ball. Standing now I could reach my finger for the hole in the middle of the ring and it moving on its cord. These were early attempts to bowl. Bowling began in ancient Egypt. It spread to Europe when Europe came there. In 1609 the Dutch East India Company explorer Henry Hudson discovered the Hudson Bay, bringing bowling and Dutch colonization to New Amsterdam (later New York) (Wikipedia). Bowling games of different forms also noted by Herodotus. Stickball however began in prehistoric times as a way for tribes to settle disputes without going to war (Wikipedia, [email protected]). Stickball somewhat similar to lacrosse. But stickball and bowling relate as thought to grammar. The noise of bowling similar to turtle leg rattles. Herodotus wrote that Lydians invented bowling when they had nothing to eat and subverted their hunger by playing. A finger could catch the ring pull to and fro at the window. The hornet-nest masks. Smallpox. A mule. The corn was staple. Missionaries. Spelling lessons and vocabulary. Sacred mounds stretched far back as China’s long river. A junction was where they came together and went away again. For she said, if I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole (Mark 5:28). The pages of the Bible seemed his clothing. School and Sunday school w/church were staples too. School eventually returned the stickball from the ground to the air as a form of the apostrophe in its proper use.

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. It Was Over There by That Place is forthcoming in The Atlas Review Press Chapbook Series. Currently Glancy teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.