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Whole days made up of intensities of light—as if the rays that pierce clouds in Baroque paintings were gathered in multiple sheaves and fanned out melting into that cloudless profound blue that beams I am purity incarnate— and an excitement, as if of revelation about to come, in the basking honeyed warmth lifted and swept away by currents of chill, then set down again— tumbleweeds bounce up like girls playing hopscotch, leaf crumble, small twigs, scurry back on the sidewalk, like water sucked into the ocean before the next wave. And then quiet. And isn’t that what we need — a perfection of contentment edged by violent change, change edged by contentment, never to be grounded, as the body grounds itself to a drug which then loses its rush, over and over again to be removed from and returned to our illusions: that if only we could stop doing what we must do now, stop shunning what we once did, leave home, come home, burn home, build home, we would arrive at happiness. …Leaf litter lull on the lawns, then cottonwood gold gyring, like wheat tossed in the air, revealing the sinuous wind… The Evansville Review 12 (2002). |