By Quitman Marshall “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water…” –Psalms 1:3 I was there to seek and to honor a shared past we are still barely speaking about. Certain things have made us, certain things with no relation to the gushing of popular rhetoric that moats life in […]
Author: Quitman Marshall
Quitman Marshall’s most recent book of poems, his fifth, You Were Born One Time, won the SC Poetry Archives Book Prize. A founding host of the Literary Series at Spoleto Festival USA, he won the Writers Exchange Award (Poets & Writers) in 1996. His roving manuscripts include Swampitude: Escapes with the Congaree (nonfiction), The Bloody Point (novel), and American Folklore (poems). He lived on West 15th St. in Manhattan from 1978 until 1990. Since 2001 he has lived in Beaufort, SC, with his wife and three children, and he teaches school—sometimes English, sometimes writing, sometimes French.
Alligator
I’m out of touch, I know.The years with children, latein coming for me, have passedmost rapidly, like a stream downhill,singing past the stones, happyto be water. Now a flatteningand the stream must mergewith the wide, dirty river. “I don’t think I will,”as Howard Hughes once said. And the alligator hasn’t movedall afternoon. I’ve watched itoff […]
Reading Invisible Man
She said, “You have a nice collection of music— not bad for a white boy.” Curled up on a box in the backof the warehouse, I read the master’s book.He took everything, or tried to,and put it in. Around mewere stoves and televisions,refrigerators and long stereos,and under me a washing machine,the unclean place I’d go to […]