#primarylist

Listen as you read (Spotify playlist)

Bucky Barnes

Hope is a Heartache Set to: Hope is a Heartache by LEON

Nightmare Set to: I'll Be Seeing You by Billie Holliday

Blind Trust Set to: As the World Caves In (Cover by: Sarah Cothran)

Russian Secret

“The Heaven of Animals” (1961) 

Heaven similar to natural habitat 

“If they have lived in a wood / It is a wood” (2-3)

Hunters and the Hunted 

“For some of these, / It could not be the place / It is, without blood. / These hunt, as they have done, / But with claws and teeth grown -perfect” (17-21)

“And those that are hunted / Know this as their life, / Their reward: to walk / Under such trees in full knowledge / Of what is in glory above them, / And to feel no fear, / But acceptance, compliance. / Fulfilling themselves without pain” (29-36).

Deliverance (1970) - Ed and the local. 

The Cycle of Predators and Prey

“At the cycle’s center, / They tremble, they walk / Under the tree, / They fall, they are torn, / They rise, they walk again” (37-41)

“The Hospital Window” (1962)

Engines

“As the wild engines stand at my knees / Shredding their gears and roaring, / And I hold each car in its place / For miles, inciting its horn / To blow down the walls of the world” (38).

Human Body

“Slowly I move to the sidewalk / With my pin-tingling hand half dead / At the end of my bloodless arm. / I carry it off in amazement” (45-48).

Spirituality

“My recognized face fully mortal / Yet not; not at all, in the pale, / Drained, otherworldly, stricken, / Created hue of stained glass” (50-53).

“Buckdancer’s Choice” (1965)

Improvisation 

“my mother, / Warbling all day to herself / The thousand variations of one song” (339).

“Fred black, with cymbals at heel, / An ex-slave who thrivingly danced / To the ring of his own clashing light / Through the thousand variations of one song / All day to my mother’s prone music, / The invalid’s warbler’s note” (16-21).

Body as (Musical) Instrument

Whistling and Dancing

Cultural Death and Individual Death

“For years, they have all been dying / Out, the classic buck-and-wing men / Of traveling minstrel shows” (8-10).

“For ill women and for all slaves / Of death, and children enchanted at walls / With a brass-beating glow underfoot” (28-30)

“The Sheep Child” (1966)

Man/Human Body and Beast

“The great grassy world from both sides, / Man and beast in the round of their need” (42-43).

Narrative Life/Control