Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation,...
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Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds. Nobody could count all of them— the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild. But what in this world is perfect? I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided— and that one wears an orange blight— and this one is a...
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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough,...
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1 Last night the geese came back, slanting fast from the blossom of the rising moon down to the black pond. A muskrat swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried to the secret lodges to tell everyone spring had come. And so it had. By morning when I went out the last of the ice had disappeared, blackbirds sang on the shores. Every year the geese, returning, do this, I don’t know how. 2 The curtains opened and there was an old man in...
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(by Linda Barton) Bhutan, November 2000 The young boy Maybe seven grabbed my hand In the dark Held it tight Tighter than I have ever been held He led me through a small gate We were crushed and I worried for him His size I wondered why me He wanted something from me Not what I had expected But to tell me to Go slow Be careful and watch for my life His body shook and I knew He feared for his I moved slowly He pulled me past the others...
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