Part III
Wakened into
nightmare
alert in ready
vigilance,
metabolism’s
price,
ancient
instinct cast molten,
congealed into
the form of beast
too loyal to
leave the web
untended for a
moment,
too stomach to
be mind,
too now ever
to be then.
Whatever could
it do?
Where would it
go?
Milkweed,
cradle of the web,
wind-rocked
and brittle,
danced in
frenzied tempo
with
extremity.
Built better
than she knew
for a gentler
use
the web became
a sail,
prevailed
when its
anchor gave,
the milkweed
tower
snapped off
low
from its
purchase on the earth
with a final
body blow.
As a piece,
the entire
ship flew free
coughed from
earth complete:
milkweed, web
and spider:
Dorothy
sticking to her farm,
her farm stuck
tight to Dorothy.
Fierce at
first
the course of
clearing earth
collisionless
through all debris.
More slowly
than its birth
the tempest
leaves
the ravaged
earth
behind, below
overcome at
last
by stronger
victor,
gravity.
Silent
at the lower
edge of silence
it sighs its
last
and dies in
resignation
upon the upper
edge of air,
thin and
growing thinner,
becoming very
rare.
In the 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz,” the main character, Dorothy Gale, was taken, along with her farmhouse home, by a tornado from Kansas to the magical land of Oz. After a series of adventures, she returned home by tapping her heels together three times while repeating, "There's no place like home." However, in the 6th book in the series, “The Emerald City of Oz” (1910), author L. Frank Baum related that Dorothy moved to the palace in the capital, while her guardians, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, settled in a farmhouse on its outskirts, after they were unable to pay the mortgage on the new farmhouse built at the end of the first book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900). Dorothy’s last name was not mentioned at all in the first two Oz books but appeared in Baum’s 1902 script for his Broadway play, “The Wizard of Oz,” as the setup for a punchline: She introduced herself as “one of the Kansas Gales," to which the Scarecrow replied, "That accounts for your breezy manner."
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