winds blow west from

better, worldly places—

              Morocco, Greece,

              unnamed islands—

bringing with them the ashes

of centuries and longing

the Carolina clay of which i

was born, which colors my hair

and my attitude, slips through

my fingers, back into the lake water,

glinting and winking and

plopping and gliding down

to the bottom, settling back in-

to its telos between my rejoicing toes

how many times have i been here,

in different incarnations? --in the wombs

of my female kin, in the deliberate gaits

of the family menfolk?

could they smell

the Moroccan saffron, even then, without

the luxury of geography? did they hear

the faint, exultant opas echoing across

the muddy water?

each generation thinks

it invented bad behavior,

good sex,

and yearning.

Margaret Mason Tate is a twenty-old-year-old senior at St. Andrews College majoring in Creative Writing. She recently returned from doing an intensive study of Ezra Pound with his daughter in Italy, and this fall she will be making preparations to enroll in an MFA program. She is deeply petrified of birds, and she has ten different gazpacho recipes.