Scarecrow: the Road to Toulouse 1

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63 Scarecrow: the Road to Toulouse A man, hanging stiffly from the roadside tree, smeared my eyes awake with sunlight dyes, and after-luncheon calm burst against the rolling scream our tires must have sucked into the road, twisting out of side that dangling arm. “What’s the French word for scarecrow?” looped out of me like rope to clink to. She steadied it with words, drove slower till she saw I understood “Some farmers over here (not like America, I guess?) put them in trees. They get in cherry trees” – the birds, she meant – “and chuk-chuk-chuk: all you get is holes.” I felt the cutting of the beak. The man’s head was gone, back there in the leaves, the limbs, I hadn’t caught it. The other arm, yes its tendons of straw crimped, clenched for his signature: his bled-out warning from the tinsel-threaded legs, the ravaged vest, the odor-flapping space below the bludgeoned, splotchy hat, above the splintered broomstick-neck (oh, how imagination spun around it, scouring hopelessly to raise a human face!) – his personal X, a zigzag spasm final, enforceable (both law and surname pointing straight to wilderness where family of cutlass, musketry, or cannonball had blazed his legacy through smoking tents and charring huts while wild-bird witnesses changed chaos in the trees). “Ever wish you were a bird? “ she asked, and roadbed screams carved from me “Right now! so I could chuk-chuk-chuk against your head and foot to slow us down” my foot loosened, scraped the floorboard (contd)

Full description

Poem written by Emanuel, detailing a drive through the countryside where the narrator sees a scarecrow hanging in a tree. Raised on Page. (Page 1)

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  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    682 kB
  • container title
    James A. Emanuel Papers
  • creator
    James A. Emanuel
  • issue
    BOX 4 FOLDER 26, "The Chopping Block (Selected Poems)," draft 1988 (1 of 2)
  • rights
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • rights holder
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • version
    Unknown