*****
For only about a week, the poet lived at a house in a neighborhood in Mississippi, described elsewhere in the poem “A Summer Night in Jackson”.
Although her fellow residents, native Southerners all, could not be said to be of mystical bent, everyone noticed a new shadow which appeared on the living room wall the first night of that week — looking uncannily like the head of a man wearing an old fashioned country cap.
This poet has been channeling all her life, and knew an entity which wanted to speak when she saw one.
“Would you like me to find out who he is, and whether he has a story to tell?” I asked.
“Well, I suppose…” came the answer in a slow Southern drawl, “If he’s going to be here, we should get to know him a little…”
So that evening the poet got out her pen, sat comfortably, and opened herself up in just the same way she does to receive the sonnets she typically composes in well under fifteen minutes’ time.
And wrote. Until dawn, without stopping at all.
That’s how we’ve come to have the words of Will the Woodworker, later put into rhyme by the poet and published abroad.
When next she visited the little house in Jackson, the shadow was gone.
