from Noon Song
The preacher came up the dusty road followed by the girl pulling the wagon stacked with bibles. The preacher walked ahead of her, working it from side to side like he was addressing the last assembly on earth, staying ahead of the girl, who struggled to keep up. From far away the heat made their footsteps tremble on the dusty road like candle flames, caesura and counter-caesura in the moth-betoken fluttering of the wayfarer world. The girl stopped once or twice to catch her breath but the preacher kept striding ahead, on long scissor legs toward the kingdom of God. He was shouting about salvation into the clear bright air above his head, but the words got lost in the driving cadence of his apocalyptic cries. The bibles looked like a pyramid of gold-green bars stacked by an Egyptian slave. They were stacked neatly and covered taut with mosquito netting in the beat-up wagon, like newly minted gold.
From Lamb Bright Saviors by Robert Vivian. Copyright 2010 © by Robert Vivian. Excerpted with permission of University of Nebraska Press.