Drastic Final Image: “Back Home” Back Home The girl who used to sing in the choir would have a slow shadow on dependable walls, I saw, We walked summer nights. Persons came near in those days, both afraid but not able to know anything but a kind of Now. In the maples an insect sang insane for hours about how deep the dark was. Over the river, past the light an the bridge, and then where the light quelled at limits in the park, we left the town, the church lagging pretty far behind, When I went back I saw many sharp things: the wild hills coming to drink at the river, the church pondering its old meanings. I believe the hills won; [ am afraid the girl who used to sing in the choir broke into jagged purple glass. 127 AMA person who has moved away from a little town where he lived as a young man has gone back for a visit, and while there he has remembered a girl he used to know. This girl was a certain kind, good, young, steady, and subjected along with the young man to the trance-like summer influences which the poem tries to evoke: it was a wonderful time and a terrible time, and the rec- ollection of it is almost unbearably intense, It is that combina- tion of goodness, and danger, and beauty—and absolute loss— which I want to conjure with my admittedly drastic final image: jagged purple glass. I hope the image is justified by many things in the poem—the church windows implied, the lights and shad- ows, the sharp things, the fear. Asa construction, I hope that the poem carries itself off by means of the deliberately narrative movement and by its three-part development. The stanzas will serve my purposes if they impose any general sense of recur rence, even just because they are about the same length—no rigorous pautern is wanted: | would prefer that the reader be en- ticed along by gene displacements and sufliciently frequent verbal events, even such slight ones as having to rove from line two to line three to pick up the ending of the first sentence: “I saw.” T want that reader to strell with increasing vividness thro the summer nights of a small town, and then into the intensity of the final realization. No? It doesn't work? I suppose not—but oh how I'd like to make itdo so! When | hear this hanging in the air, after saying it, “broke into Jagged purple glass," | have several feelings, and one of them of guilt occurs to me, Just the idea that it might seem that writing is done by figuring out something striking, and | wouldn't like to think of it that way, It happens, but it’s not so satisfying as other things. What I'm afraid of is it will seem as if we're tryi for certain local, granulated effects. This is from back a little way in my writing. | remember I felt prety good about the ending—*broke into jagged purple glass." That's the way to do it, I thought. But afterward, other things began to come to me and because I know how to do that I began not to believe in it. Once you've got the formula, that’s not it anymore. It’s something else. 128 NG