“Supernatural Bread” by Gregory Pardlo
Supernatural Bread
Lexington Avenue tugged the bus to Easthampton
like a joke dollar bill just out of reach each time
I neared it having missed it’s stop at 77th, and chased
it to the next which I hoped would be 69th but had to bet
on 66th when the curtain of traffic drew back to show
its brake lights squint, a wounded beast retreating,
but I gave chase as if myself pursued by zombified regrets
hot on my heels, nostalgic for my undoing, though it wouldn’t,
the bus, in fact stop until it reached the curb at 59th,
after I’d slalomed bodies under the Hunter College
jet bridge, got beyond the aromatic reach of halal
carts and the Greek grill truck, caterers to immigrants’
catalyst of class mobility, as a mist slicked
my rucksack plus the duffel I had packed because
there is no night bus back to Manhattan, and I’d had
to stay the night out there where it was more like New
England than New York, but every border is a false
horizon, a dream of the Red Sea’s righteous
discretion. In Easthampton I roomed in an eighteenth-
century farmhouse the restoration of which
was overseen by this owner-guy who bad-mouthed
universities as hotbeds of treason, professors
consumed by hatreds that have no source, but I was
probably okay, he allowed, as a poet, that is, someone
whose art is impartial and should, he said, like a good
education, make nothing happen. He talked of
sovereignty and his frustrations with “landmarking”
—the illusion that one’s environment can be arrested
in time to appoint the land as a shared ancestor,
its immortal aura enameled by the law, but his complaint
outlined the injustice that laws could limit his use
of his property based on “rumors,” as he called them,
the unrecorded oral record, that the farmhouse once
harbored fugitives, you know, from before the Civil War,
he said, gesturing to antiquity, time beyond
memorial, and I saw them, haunting, forever tied
to this place, and I thought to ask him why euphemize
slavery as if uttering the word might revive a statute
of limitations like a covenant on the land we occupied.
Haven’t we progressed? His question rattles the Great
Chain of Being, its eugenic agenda and the botched
ontology it describes, but I held my tongue and harbored
in my head the weary travelers chasing liberation which
by nature has to lurch just out of reach each time it gets
precipitously close to revealing itself as the mere
abstraction that it is, the way even the harbor
in my mind reduced the fugitives’ lives to an allegory
of my own as if we’d together received all tomorrow’s
blessings in catching the coach that moseyed down Lex—
as if, indeed, the very pachyderm of time itself would
have left a bus-shaped door in the rain, the threshold
of the future neither coming into view nor losing focus,
the living thread of our connection being the divine
imagination that runs among and through us without end.
“Supernatural Bread” from Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo. Copyright © 2024 by Gregory Pardlo. Reprinted by permission of the author and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No portion of the excerpts may be reproduced without permission in writing from the author and publisher.
Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Spectral Evidence and Digest, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review’s Honickman Prize, and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University – Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University Abu Dhabi.