July 2, 1968

This set of drafts reveals more viscerally the emotional core of the poem than do the other drafts presented in this exhibit.  In one draft Goedicke writes:

Purged by violence, whipped by the wind
By the sea-gull's beach picked clean
Into no rhetoric, neither hunger, nor love
Only the pure abstraction of bones
By the wind blown, by the salt whitened
By the sea-gull's beak picked clean

It may also be worth noting that this entry was written at the MacDowell Colony, shortly before Goedicke met her then future husband Leonard Wallace Robinson. Along the top margins of one of the pages Goedicke writes "R / There's always a third party / R. talk / Let him go, let him go, god bless him wherever he may roam-" The "R" Goedicke references is most likely the lover she was to meet at the Outer Banks in June, and the quote "Let him go, let him go..." is from a version of the "St. James Infirmary Blues."