Guilford College - Quaker Yearbook (Greensboro, NC)

Page 23 text:

Down in Barnaby ' s garden everyone is shockproof. All new, better than before, insulated spines have been installed. Excellent craftsmen, having the determination to seek out the trouble, have minimized the risk in touching them, in being touched by them. Barnaby ' s garden is clean and well kept, spotless - crystal vines rising on tile walls, parasol flowers spinning a garden ' s music. Down inside your shoulders you can ' t shake Barnaby ' s garden off, owning mutual need for concrete curbs to keep out weeds. Take your shoes off to enter, test the wind and float - sing, but mind your diction. Barnaby ' s watching - approaching; receding backwards like a crab, cringing from seizures of seeing beyond aggravating the furnace on his back. His hands, inflamed, are like brown stone toys, resolving, arranging garden joys, wrapping hard into tree knots and unfurling hours later into morning breaking across your eyes. Barnaby is his own gardener, tilling the soil with long brown fingers, turning up long brown worms, and feeding on them in the proper night. At the day ladyworms and willows dance their stupid fantasies at the nape of his charred and tolerant neck, tickle his mutinous wit. Not thinking, thinking, people stop and listen as Barnaby laughs, and the garden sun scorches their well-oiled skins, fills their skulls with notions of summer worms entangled, touching without wonder. Aloft a tree etches a great hypnotic shade approaching them like coming rain far across a meadow. Standing, entertaining medal light, comprehending motions of stark and brazen suns, a few people scatter at the last moment - an unnerving, shameful miscalculation of the speed of tree shades. Barnaby dreams of longlasting sleep and his circle is gently eclipsed - a swan moving above a private fish. Hours of light awaken him and he rises and sheds a layer of skin.