The book that caused me the most anguish […] the one I feel most tender toward.
—William Faulkner, 1955
Somewhere in that leisurely tortured syntax,
where minds, like streams, overflow into streams,
a man and his Caddy retrace their tracks
through the flux of luckless yet conscious dreams,
the man-child safe in her arms again, father
silhouetted in the door, the scent of
fresh leaves, of a sister who mustn’t linger,
snagged on a nail, drawers muddied, softness of
a slipper slipping away forever and
never beyond the flood of sound and fury,
where only an idiot, cut off, would stand
waiting, fingers in chained links, in no hurry—
witness to generations of decay,
where brothers drown and daughters run away.
—John Pidgeon, Green Bay
