We will see her standing there, at Larry’s desk, reading. It will be almost like a painting by Vermeer. The lovely lady, the wonderful morning sunlight which seems to caress her face and her hands and the white, white sheet. She will read. She will smile.
And when the reading will be done, she will raise her eyes from the poem in the typewriter, and she will address the house: “Larry?”
IMAGO:
The Mockroach’s Song
If roach were man and man were roach,
the subjects both would brood and broach
are love, dependency, survival.
We trust you in your rearrival
to read this fable in reverse
and keep the world from getting worse.
We are the scurry of your ugly
despisèd motives—humble, bugly,
but not so bad we should be kaput.
You shot yourself in your own foot,
went nearly west. We kept you easter.
Before you blast off your own keister,
wise up, stay more, re-ken your kin.
We know you out, we know you in.
We drink your nectar, eat your shit.
We haven’t had enough of it.
You think you pine with love and grief?
Yet think how pitiful and brief
we are, your small, unloved familiars:
our hearts will bridge the Void. Will yours?
Some say your world will end in fire
and ours survive. Not so. No choir
can hymn or hum inhumanly.
Thou needest us. We needest Thee.
Grow up, earn Love, like us conceive
a God to pray to and believe.
Ring out bomb-doom and ring us true.
You live, we are, you die, we do.
Ding-dong the dang dumb don’ts to soundless hell.
In purple sympathy we twain shall dwell.
About the Author
Donald Harington
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published eleven other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also published several non-fiction works on artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
Table of Contents
INSTAR THE FIRST: The Maiden,
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
INSTAR THE SECOND: Maiden No More,
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
INSTAR THE THIRD: The Rally,
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
INSTAR THE FOURTH: The Consequence,
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
INSTAR THE FIFTH: The Woman Pays,
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
INSTAR THE SIXTH: The Convert,
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
IMAGO: The Mockroach’s Song
The Cockroaches of Stay More Page 28