Sack Lodge Quotes

In what vile part of this anatomy Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack The hateful mansion.

GOAT HOUR GOSPEL (SUCH SALVAGE) BY MARK WAGENAAR   Just as the evening’s about to move on, they appear, not as the apparitional deer— here, & gone in the next moment, without a sound—but one by one, bumbling through briar, chewing through poison ivy, sniffing at trees. A slow procession walking beneath elms & birches that hold up the last light. And you’re alone with the traces of things, the news in front of you: the crooked skeleton of Richard III was dug up from a parking lot, humpbacked, once buried in his boots & battlefield wounds. Nearby a lost river has been uncovered, & coughed up its mouthful of Roman skulls. No relic is safe, it seems, from an invisible tide that presses them upward. Sometimes it’s not the loss that hurts but the indignities of the discovery. And yet beside the diggers & builders of new things is this mangy congregation, pushing through the scrub without a trail or blueprint or direction. Their dirty white fur shines a little in this late, lost hour. They bleat as they shamble & piss on each other without warning, or maybe as a warning, or in greeting. They’ll eat anything—tin can, T-shirt, canvas sack, bones of animals & kings, & carry them awhile. And so do we: each night, across the country, people turn up at hospitals unable to speak, for the needle or nail lodged in their throats. They’re unable to explain why, but we know— that desperate mix of need & panic that can drive us to keep something safe for good. These dearest items take your words & leave them luminous, radiolucent, shining on the X-ray, like this swallowed ring: a ghostly eclipse. Small comfort to share an appetite with these goats, this dishevelled lot. But a comfort, too, to know that some things will be saved from the soil, rescued from time’s indignities, if only for a little while, & by these scruffy reliquaries, on the other side of the valley now, flickering slightly as they near the vanishing point of the timberline. And we might call such salvage mercy . And it must be even for the undeserving, for those of us who didn’t live right, or live best. Whatever that means. Mercy will find us, even when we fail to recognize it, when we least expect it.

Because this is Frank. This is what she does. She seeps in, like a very dangerous gas leak; she finds a way to lodge herself where she is not wanted. Roots herself so deep she cannot be excised.

Sadye Pryor is a pillar of the Pensacola Mt. Zion Baptist Church. I myself see the inside of a church only when there’s a funeral. Aunt Sadye wears glasses and frumpy sack dresses and looks studious. I was born dapper and will die dapper; I don’t wear the reading spectacles I need. She is a librarian who’s known for raising her eyebrows to get students to quiet down. I am a show producer known for raising my eyebrows to get kids to project louder. Yes, presidents of Motown PTAs have been known to question whether I am a fit example for our young ones, because I consort with show folk and gamblers and others associated with nightlife. Sadye Pryor maintains perfectly proper associates (fellow board members of the YWCA, members of the Eastern Star lodge she leads, fellow Sunday School teachers) and is lauded as an example of PTA-praiseworthy deportment. In Pensacola, indeed across Florida, and all around these United States. Sadye was born a virgin and by choice will likely die a virgin. Some folks call me the old reprobate.