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| Excerpts > Spring 2004 |
Judith Ortiz Cofer Rice Rice Her calling is to carve all the truthshe finds on single grains of rice. She spends her days gleaning through piles of Grade A long grain Mahatma, butterflying fingers feeling for the perfect one, pearly as a baby's tooth, a planed oval on which she will script with a nearly invisible needle in vertical lines, like Buddhist text: The Preamble to the Constitution The chorus of John Lennon's Revolution The Collected Dickinson The First Amendment She is now working on fitting the Lord's Prayer upon the face of a single grain, but has failed beyond "deliver us from evil." She will attempt it again on an anomalous grain she found nearly three times larger than nature usually allows. She vows to persevere until the kingdom, until the power and the glory, until the amen. Her dream is to buy a silo full of rice from all over the world, to dive into the dry sea of plenty, and of finding that perfect grain, blank as the future, where she will preserve: Quixote’s windmill scene, also on his first seeing Dulcinea Ode on a Grecian Urn Aretha Franklin’s Respect Parts of To the Lighthouse Some of the Psalms All of the Songs of Solomon Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones.  |
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