BY JAN HAAG
STONECYPHER
10-24-97
I have a friend who lives on
Stonecypher Road,
tall, and named Julia,
an artist of esoteric
acclaim,
creating circles on the lawns
with thin wire
and
white flags
on
Coca-Cola's former grounds.
Stonecypher --
the ringing
romanticism
of
the name --
runes
and
encrpytions,
lost languages
and
secret
lore
personify
Julia,
statuesque,
undecipherable,
posing
as male
and female,
strange,
living in rooms
of an
elegance
beyond the Age of Innocence
before the movie,
before the
fame,
Julia.
Not her real name,
Not her real time,
Julia
on
Stonecypher Road.
I was there
in the
winter
when the ice storm
broke the branches
of a hundred
trees
-- crack!
crack!
crackling
in the dawn and in the
night,
ice laden trees
rifle-shotting through the night.
For days
we could
walk,
but not ride.
We sat in the blue room,
and the
red room,
with the cats: Sita
and Phoebe.
The dog, a Viszla, too rambunctions for
the middling small
library,
frightened me.
I listened to the rifle cracks,
the
cannonade
through the night,
along the Suwanne,
she from the
South and me from the North,
thinking of the Civil War
which by
then
went on only in
Julia's breast
and my own.
Civil we
were,
and at war with we knew not what.
Tall, elegant,
sophisticated,
mover and shaker,
Julia
living her life out in the
blue rooms
of Stonecypher Road,
where her friend
arrived and ate
turnips --
fresh from the ground
and free,
under the
frost.
Were there cyphers cut in the
stone?
Some place?
Across the road at the down-home music
barn?
-- to
which I crossed alone,
dark, under the stars,
sat in a pew to hear
the music,
free in the freezing night.
Julia,
of 4040 Stonecypher
Road,
tall and elegant, friend of my youth
enigma of my age, artist,
Grand Dame,
mother, child, friend and rune.
I gave her one of my
Hermes scarves.
For though she and John
owned the house on
Stonecypher Road,
she had never had
thick French silk
around her
neck.
Julia.
Tall.
Enigma.
Artist.
Queen.
She told
me where the name
Stonecypher came from
but I have forgotten.
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
Dour
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India
Lung-gom-pas
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BY JAN HAAG