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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Law Amidst the Rest SETH ABRAMSON _______________________ A Brief History for Ventriloquists Its Egyptian inventors would describe how it erupts from the belly and plunges into the world, seeking air from inside the chests of others, often dead lovers or compatriots; how Caesarians saw seminal Christians elevate it to god head - a divine nationalism crafted to last. Our own glossolalia is secular, nearly inaudible, found in temporal boundaries such as those between generations: the ones who crossed the sea to set a flag on the reddened shores at Dunkirk; the ones who held their farthest point to be somewhere in the wetlands of Asia; the ones who remember a beginning but nothing afterward, for whom there is no manifest destiny and no forward. It isn't like family reunions are anything but summits; we can't grapple with our grandparents at some bank turned donnybrook in the Dust Bowl - as if they'll forget where they end and their children begin - or converse with those marines who stuck their hands in used cartridges in '68, as if some things were incapable of emptying out, as if the frontier could dance away and remain uncaught, goading us on to find our own voice, to explain it with Jesus or Hoover or Trich Quan Duc or the simplest allegory of all: the World rests upon an Elephant, that Elephant [577]
upon a Turtle; should anyone ask Elephant what Turtle stands upon, he replies, "It's Turtles, Turtles, all the way down . . . " [578]
If You Ask Your Attorney To Be Concise When he speaks, it will not be to describe those neighbors you were born to, whose boys like grim ferrets poked their heads out the weeds and stole caps from your juiced Honda; because he knows you loved life in the neighborhood / and may even have loved sending your furtive retrievers, like warhorses, out to battle with the locals, and did treat them well - your retrievers - once they'd plunged down hillsides with red tongues and upturned noses, doing so only because you'd asked them to, and sometimes meant it / he won't say you believed in those dogs more than the three sons who were taken away, though he knows you did, and knows it was because they could better ride the downdraft of your discouragement, and had no fear you would betray them / if not out of love but because you, too, thrilled in the loose, uncertain spaces of the mudflats, and thwarting a hardscrabble policeman, and were of course the one who once, in a defile so bannered with vapor and sleet in grey hooks even the mud spat back, fought one / and did so thanking your father, your real father, for hitting you so hard, so often. So your man will say little of a spindly wife who beetled her way through the valley leading off and away from you, the intemperate years no more than a desultory jumble in the back seat of her Duster / good riddance is all you said to her, good riddance. And from this din there isn't any sound your advocate will extract, not a single note he'll find to ride this chaos home - not the snap of the infant you in a washer, or the teen you cradling an oily pistol / or the eternal synaptic you who might find, in the thinning daylight ahead, that one ferocious moment to live in forever, in which there is no love left but the love of those moments which precede every moment of regret, obscure lullabies / with nothing to hang their words upon but the bony grapples of your wrists, which your defender may briefly touch as you turn to go - blank as a principle - into the stairwell which leads you down to those men who, loveless but not disloyal, take odd pleasure / as so many do / in knowing they'll never see you again. []
Seth Abramson, a 1998 graduate of Dartmouth College and a 2001 graduate of Harvard Law School, is a trial attorney with the New Hampshire Public Defender and the co-founder of The New Hampshire Review. His work has appeared in American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Seattle Review, and Green Mountains Review. He has poems forthcoming in AGNI, Verse, The Iowa Review, and Colorado Review. "A Brief History for Ventriloquists " first appeared in the Indiana Review. "If You Ask Your Attorney to Be Concise " was first published in the Antioch Review. |
