tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33213927025791962872024-02-20T20:01:09.695-08:00The RiverShould Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-89657501144413002382018-11-22T17:34:00.001-08:002018-11-22T17:34:09.772-08:00Overindulgence Inc. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Now I'm in the groaning and burping stage....</div>
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<br />Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-78584942963581083952015-03-07T18:32:00.002-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.698-08:00A Bend in the RiverIn the recent evenings this summer I've walked down and stand in the trees, cottonwood lining the Big Hole in light paused just so in the leaves, as if the change in the river here were not simply known to me, but apprehended. I did not start out this way; I began with the worst sort of ignorance, the grossest inquiries. Now I ask very little. I observe the swift movement of water through the nation of fish at my feet. I wonder privately if there are for them, as rare for me, moments of faith, however brief.<br />
<br />
The river comes around from the southeast to the east at this point: a clean shift of direction, water deep and fast on the outside of the curve, flowing slower over the lip of a broad gravel bar on the inside, continuing into a field of shattered boulders to the west.<br />
<br />
I kneel and slip my hands like eels beneath the surface of the water. I feel the wearing away of the outer ridge, the exposure of roots, the undermining. I imagine eyes in the tips of my fingers, like the eye-stalks of crawdads. Fish stare at my hands, conscious of the trespass. the thought that I might be observed disturbs me.<br />
<br />
I've wanted to take the measure of this turn in the river, grasp it, for my own reasons. I feel closer to it now. I know which deer drink at which spots on this bank. I know of the small screech owl nesting opposite. I am familiar with the raccoon and fisher whose tracks appear here, can even tell them apart by their prints.<br />
<br />
The attempt to wrestle meaning from this spot began poorly, with illness. A pain, slow in coming like so many that seemed in my back, then in my chest. An ache, yearning, as strong as the wish to be loved, a pain along my self. As the weeks went on I moved about less and less, until finally I merely sat here, the recliner tilted back.<br />
<br />
I began to think (as on a staircase descending to an unsure level within myself) about the turns in the river, and how they pertained to me, to my life. If I could understands the turns in the river, I could imitate it, I reasoned.<br />
<br />
Thus became a search, doomed to failure.<br />
<br />
I finally reduced the bend in the river, and my life, to an elegant, verbal equation. This happened at night, and I let it sink in, then got up and went to bed. I knew I didn't have the strength then to realize them, but I felt my recovery was certain.<br />
<br />
I woke during the night to sounds of birds, the few that live in early summer in Montana. They told me much, my mistakes, things I can't speak of here. They departed, leaving the odor of bruised grass and cracked bone in the air. I knew my understanding was incorrect.<br />
<br />
I have lost, as I might have inferred, some sense of myself. I no longer require as much. And though I am not hopeful of recovery, an adjustment as smooth as the way the river lies against the earth at this point, this is no longer the issue with me. I am more interested in this: from above, to a hawk, the bend must appear only natural and I for the moment a part. A greater whole we are all part of. It seems we all, me and them, are one. This has somewhat dismantled my loneliness, and my fear of the end.<br />
<br />
Like the river, I'll flow out to sea, become part of the greater world around us. This idea gives me comfort.<br />
<br />
I will tell you something. It is to the thought of the river's banks that I most frequently return, their wordless emergence at a headwaters, the control they urge on the direction of the river, mile after mile, and their disappearance here on the beach as the river enters the ocean. It occurs to me that at the very end the river is suddenly abandoned, that just before it's finished the edges disappear completely, that in this moment a whole life is revealed.<br />
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Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-57887565255397948542015-01-26T19:37:00.003-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.616-08:00Downstream Pt. 2She would go down to the river while it was still dark, and know by the call of the thrushes when it was light enough (opening her eyes,having been at the memory of some wine, like Burgundy but with another name in a village,and how she had felt to find they were alike, and parentless, and how he had looked away as though embarrassed when she said sexual, about her first feelings)---light enough to see the path through the trees. But she went when she went always before dawn, before she could see.<br />
<br />
One morning in the gray light, it's sound as first submerged in the river's movements, a dory came. A man in a hat rowing. Moving downriver, as foreign as anything she could imagine. Another stood in the bow. He wore another hat and was dressed in neat khaki clothing. She saw the gentle whip of his fly rod pointing into the slack water behind large rocks, after rainbow trout. He looked--exactly the word she was after--silly. But he whipped the rod to set the fly here and there, time and again, the other man rowing, now the rattle of an oarlock, the boat moving toward her, the excessive neatness of their clothing, the creases, the grim expression clear on their red, razor-stropped faces, rowing hard.<br />
<br />
She froze with the weight of lead in her belly, coming that fast across the water toward her---never saw her, whipping the shallows for the waiting trout, thirty feet away. Silly. Her face quivered. Silly. She put her hands, her palms cold from the rock, against her face. What this meant, the fear, or qualms about being seen by men, she put off examining. <br />
<br />
Winter and summer she would come down to be in the rocks by the water, lying in the dark, waiting for the light, as though by the act itself she could overcome her losses. She meant to remember to tell someone--how the colors came out each morning, show she would like a dress where the wind blew each layer open, somehow. Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-23571975982136484612014-11-07T08:25:00.003-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.368-08:00River, The Birds<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
River: The Birds
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There are birds here.<br />
<i>I hold in my heart an absolute sorrow for birds, a sorrow so deep that
at the first light of day when I shiver like reeds fluttering in a cold
fall wind I do not know whether it is from the cold or from the sorrow.
Whether I am even capable of feeling such kindness. Perhaps I am. The
herons have taught me that.</i><br />
<br />
One rainy winter dawn I stood beneath gray clouds with my arms up
stretched, dripping in my cotton shirt (it was clear earlier, I did not
heed the wind), staring at the sand at my feet, when I felt the birds
alight. I first felt the flutter of golden plovers against my head, then
black turnstones landing softly on my arms. The red phalarope with
their wild artic visions, fighting the wind to land, prickling my
shoulders with their needling grip. Their delicate bones denying the
weight of anguish I felt from the journeys these birds had come. <br />
<br />
Beneath the weight I recalled the birds of my childhood. I had killed a
robin with a new BB gun. I thought the name of the kittiwake funny.
Later, much later in life when my father died I wondered if the
remaining uncles would want his fly rods. I coveted then in cold
contradiction to my grief. Feeling watched I turned from his bed in the
ICU and saw ravens watching me, perched on the bare branches of a
cottonwood. They waited.<br />
<br />
I became tired beyond the limits of what was capable, and lay on the sand, damp but warm.<br />
<br />
When I awoke the sky had cleared. In the damp sea air I could smell
cedar smoke, a cabin just up the mouth of the river. I felt from here I
could see far, up to the headwaters. The plovers had told me what the
herons do at night, what the tears they shed added to the mingled
memories and guilt's of the people living along the river equaled. <br />
<br />
The herons have tried to teach me, but I am still incapable of absorbing
what they have to offer. I watch one across the river, just before the
reeds on the other bank. Perhaps you know it is raining. The intensity
of your stare is then not oblivion, only an effort to spot between the
rain drops in the river, past your feet, the movement of small trout.<br />
<br />
I know, your way is to be inscrutable. When pressed you leave, the dark
grey of your wings fading into the mist. I wonder about the way you seem
to brood about the water. Is it more than fish? Do you wonder what your
tears have become, have transformed as they flowed downstream?<br />
<br />
A dream, like all of my dreams, reveal something but not all. The dream
told me that someday we will dance together. Before then I will have to
become a trout, and bear scars from your stabbing, rare, misses.
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</span>Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-83244951378174920802014-11-07T08:24:00.003-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.781-08:00The Falls<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
River, the last. The Falls
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<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-5146804361407326671" itemprop="description articleBody">
<i>I did three other stories about the river; all somewhat connected,
the same river on the Oregon Coast, the people, the occurrences. This, I
think, is the last. </i><br />
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<br />
Someone must see to it that this story is told: you shouldn't think that his man just threw his life away.<br />
<i> </i><br />
When he was a boy there was nothing about him to remember. He looked
like anything else-like the trees, the other people, like his dog.
Sometimes he would change places with the dog. For a week at a time he
was the dog and the dog was himself, and it went unnoticed. It was
harder on the dog, but the boy encouraged him and he did well at it.<br />
<br />
This is what happened. The boy grew. Visions came to him. He began to
see things. When he was eighteen he dreamed he should go up in the Crazy
Mountains, near Bozeman, to dream. He went. He was careful hitchhiking,
he took rides only from old men, old trucks. He was old enough to be
careful, but not to know why.<br />
<br />
He got a job down there around Beatty, in Oregon, and I didn't see him
for two or three years. The next time was in winter. It was the coldest
one I had ever been in. Birds froze. The river froze solid, all the way
across. I never saw that before. I picked him up hitchhiking north, he
had on dark cotton pants and a light jacket. He had a brown canvas bag,
and a hat pulled down over his ears. I pulled over right away, he looked
sorry as hell.<br />
<br />
I took him way up north, all the way to my place. He had some antelope
meat with him and we ate good. We talked. He wanted to know what I was
doing for work. I was cutting wood. He was going to go up to British
Columbia, Nanaimo, somewhere in there.<br />
<br />
I woke up the next morning when it was just getting light. I could not
hear the sound of the river and the silence frightened me until I
remembered. I heard chopping on the ice. I got dressed and went down,
the earth was like rock that winter.<br />
<br />
He had cut a hole a few feet across, black water boiling up, flowing out
of the ice, freezing. He was standing in the hole naked with his head
bowed and his arms straight up over his head with his hands open. He had
cut his arms with a knife and red blood was running down them, down his
ribs, slowing in the cold to the black water. He gave a cry, the cry
was like a bear, not a man sound, something he was tearing away from
inside himself. He climbed out and ran into the timber, long high steps.<br />
<br />
He cut wood with me that winter. He worked hard. When the trillium bloomed and the birds came he went north.<br />
<br />
I did not see him again for ten years. I was in Montana harvesting
wheat, sleeping in the back of my truck (parked under cottonwoods for
the cool air that ran down them at night). One night I heard my name. He
was by the tailgate.<br />
"You got a good spot." He said<br />
"Yeah. That you?"<br />
"Sure"<br />
How you doing?"<br />
'Good. Talk in the morning."<br />
He sounded tired, like he'd been riding all day.<br />
<br />
We worked three weeks together,the next morning someone lost their job,
too much drinking. We baled hay for days, the dust would gather in our
clothes. <br />
<br />
He came home with me, and he stayed that winter too. I was getting old
then, and he was good to have around. In the spring he left. He told me a
lot that winter, but I can't say these things. When he spoke it was
like when you fall asleep in the woods, the breeze in the pines. You
listen hard, but it's not easy.<br />
<br />
A few summers later he was in Alaska, working at a farm in the Matanuska
Valley. All that time he was alone. Once he came down to see me but I
was gone. I knew it when I got home, I went down to the river and saw
the place where he went into the water. The ground was soft around the
rocks, I knew his feet.<br />
<br />
I am not a man of power, but I waded into the river and shouted. "Keep
going, you keep going!" My heart was pounding like the falls.<br />
<br />
The last time I saw him he came to my house in the fall. He came in
quiet as air sitting in a canyon. We made dinner early and at dusk he
went out and I followed. He cut twigs from the ash, cottonwood and
alder. He brushed me with the branches, telling me I had always been a
good friend. He said this was his last time. We went swimming a little,
there is a strong current there, I had to be careful.<br />
<br />
I woke in the morning, just as light was seeping into the sky. I went to
look at his bed, he was gone. I got dressed and walked the path to the
falls. I see him all at once standing at the lip of the falls. I heard
that bear-like cry, and his hands went out. He was in the air, turning
over and over, the last moonlight finding the silver-white of his sides
and dark green water before he cut into the river, the sound lost in the
roar.<br />
<br />
I went back up the path, to a clear-cut area where alders have started
to grow. The sun was up, warm to me as I sat down, my back against the
remaining fir. Good day to go look for morels, but I fell asleep.<br />
<br />
When I awoke it was late. I went back to my truck and drove home, wondering if I felt strong enough to eat venison.
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<span class="post-author vcard">
</span>Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-10218157301578391632014-11-07T08:23:00.002-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.201-08:00Downstream<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
Downstream
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<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-1428952483066422945" itemprop="description articleBody">
<b>1952</b><br />
<br />
Rebecca Beeson drove 18 miles each morning to work in a men's clothing
store in town and came back each evening in time to fix her husband's
dinner. It was a job that had paid for a second automobile, a funeral
for an aunt and a new stove, but it left her depressed and stranded now,
at fifty-six, as if it were a clear defeat, invisible but keenly known
to her.<br />
<b> </b><br />
Her husband operated a gas station and logging supply shop in Beaver
Creek, a small town on the river where they lived. They had no children,
the only time she'd been pregnant the baby was stillborn, which had
caused Cawley Beeson a kind of dismay from which he'd never recovered.
Maybe this wasn't a place to raise children, he'd thought. He lived as
though he were waiting for wounds to heal before moving on.<br />
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<br />
He hardly noticed, when she helped him in the shop on Saturday's, that
someone often came by with wildflowers her, or to tell a story, to ask
if she'd seen the skunk cabbage in Watson's field or the pussy willows
blooming, sure signs of spring. Cawley appreciated these acts of
kindness, while he finished a job for whoever it was, as a duty done
that he had no way with.<br />
<br />
Men were attracted to Rebecca in an innocent but almost hungry way, as
though needing the pleasure she took in them. Because there was never a
hint of anything but friendship, their attentions both pleased her and
left her with a deep longing, out of which, unashamed, she lay awake at
night in a self-embrace of fantasy.<br />
<br />
Late at night, when he couldn't sleep, Cawley would roll over to her and
try to speak. Sometimes he would begin to cry and sob in anger at a
loss he couldn't find the words for. He cried against her nightgown and
drove his fist weakly into his pillow. On these nights she held him
until the pain ran it's course, and said nothing about her own yearning.<br />
<br />
She had hoped that at some point they could go away for a while, in a
deeply private place she wished to go to Europe, alone; but she could
not bear the thought of his loneliness, and did not believe that in a
journey together there could be any joy.<br />
<br />
One summer evening while Cawley was in the living room reading, she sat
on their bed with her face lowered to a glass bowl of dried blossoms in
her lap. Twenty years of anniversary roses, flowers from her first
garden, wildflowers from men who were charmed by her. She felt the tears
run the length of her nose. She wished to be rid of it, and rose with
the bowl and left.<br />
<br />
In the dark yard by the side of the house she walked down to the river
and stepped in, wetting her dress to the waist. She scattered the first
handful on the water, the pieces landed soundlessly and tettered away.
She flung the dry petals until the bowl was empty, then dipped its lip
to the current to swirl it clean.<br />
<br />
Of the flowers she threw on the water, some floated down to the log jam,
and washed up on a stump that had been cut with a saw, and had a fading
dark stain on it's surface. They stayed there until the first fall rain
washed them away. </div>
<span class="post-author vcard">
</span>Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-90232444564908615152014-11-07T08:21:00.002-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.864-08:00The Stump<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
The Stump
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<b><span style="font-size: medium;">1954</span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A storm
came this year, against which all other storms were to be measured, on a
Saturday in October, a balmy afternoon. Men in the woods cutting wood,
children outside with thoughts lodged somewhere in the memory of summer.
It came up the river valley, as did every storm in the fall, but the
grey-black thunderheads were piled up high, much too high. In the
stillness before it hit, men looked at each other as though a fast and
wiry man had pulled a knife in a bar. They felt the trees falling before
they heard the wind, and they dropped chainsaws and choker cables,
scrambled to get out. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Olin </span></span><b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></b>Sanders
tried to free his saw from the big fir, but it caught him
barberchairing, as he tried to run it hopped after him like it was
trying to find it's stump. When the wind died the men found him. They
laid him across the laps of two men in the back of the truck and sent
word ahead. When they got down to the road his wife was there crying,
with pink curlers in her hair. Two county sheriffs were there, drawn by
the word of death. When she looked through the window of the truck and
saw him broken in half, like a buckled tin can she raised her fists and
began beating on the truck. When the sheriff held her back and said in a
polite voice "Now, control yourself." she began beating her thighs. One
of the men stepped up and punched the sheriff.<br />
<br />
All this time the son, in whose lap the father's broken head was
cradled, sat silent. He was aware of the beginning of something else,
more than his father's end. His pants were wet with his father's blood.<br />
<br />
That night the boy left the house, walked past his father's shirts
hanging to dry on the line, and drove up Jumpoff Joe Road to where they
had been cutting. He sidestepped downslope with the chainsaw in his
hands to reach the stump of the tree (the blood congealed like dark sap
on the wood) and cut off the top of the stump with the stain of his
father's death on it, the saw screaming in the dim night.<br />
<br />
No one had ever done anything like this before. The lack of any
tradition in it bothered the boy. As he walked past the trees near the
house he was suddenly afraid. His mother was awake, sitting in the
darkened living room when he walked in, wearing the tattered quilt robe
that embarrassed him when his friends were around. Behind the glow of
her cigarette she asked where he had been.<br />
<br />
The butt of the tree eventually rolled downhill after the logging was
done. A family of Marten's took up residence beneath it, living as well
as was possible in that country.<br />
<br />
Olin was the only person killed, among the other dead were Cawley
Beeson's dog, and two deer, quietly butchered and passed among
neighbors. <br />
Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-27056280880866884882014-11-07T08:20:00.002-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.451-08:00Upstream<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
Upstream
</h3>
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<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8537347416062889903" itemprop="description articleBody">
The river above here is largely unknown, the climb is difficult and the
road passes near enough to provide a view, satisfying most. The river
has been explored by government mappers up to the headwaters, looking
for mineral deposits and to complete maps, but it remains unknown
nevertheless. The illusion has been sustained, if one asks around or
consults a topographical map, that it is well-known, but I know this to
be false. For example, at the headwaters itself, further up than is
shown, there are herons. At night they weep, a inconsolable grief, and
it is from these tears the river is formed.<br />
<br />
Further downstream from here, the murmurs of fish enter, and the water
feels like cold steel, impenetrable like certain shades of deep blue,
the sound of a crack working it's way through a china plate. It is from
this, the imagined but uncared for, that the river takes form, visible
water, of measurable dimension.<br />
<br />
In recent years I have spent considerable time upstream, along what I
believe to be an unknown section of the river. I have meant to examine
things closely there, and sometimes I think I have the answer and gone
gleefully ahead, only to haul myself back to an ordered course. In this
way I saw a house one day, perched at the start of the forested hill
above the river.<br />
<br />
It was painted gray, with blue cape cod style shutters. A broad porch,
shadowed by the limbs of a cottonwood. A white porcelain doorknob opened
the French door. The floors were oak parquet, the rooms spacious with
hemp rugs. The walls were papered with Cockerell marbled paper, from
England, the colors somewhere between primary and pastel, like the taste
of a peach bursting on your tongue.<br />
<br />
One fall I entered a room for the first time, and saw a book sitting on a
windowsill, open and face down. A single chair was next to the window,
as though the occupant had just left to brew tea. I sat down and read
the book, a language I didn't know, in hopes of understanding. <br />
<br />
There was a woman's bed, with a brass bedstead and a chenille spread,
somehow light was always falling on it. We would lay there, trusting,
and fall asleep in the afternoon.<br />
<br />
We would dance, the only sound of our bare feet on the wood floor. An
imagined music filling the room without echoes, strands of her hair
stuck to my cheek, the sound of our breathing.<br />
<br />
In that time I do not remember ever being away from the river, though I
know I was. Even now in the memory of it I do not know where I am. I
know I still spend time in the upper part of the river and that
relationship I know to be true.<br />
<br />
Still further up the river are the unfolding of other relationships,
together with the loss of the promise of anything to be found. I have
been told that this is the reason no one goes up that far, though the
promise, in it's way, is kept.<br />
<br />
It is the walk home that is terrifying.
</div>
<span class="post-author vcard">
</span>Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321392702579196287.post-33851884701189966152014-11-07T08:18:00.001-08:002018-11-20T12:24:16.533-08:00The Beginning <h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
River, the beginning
</h3>
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<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-1671589459566431943" itemprop="description articleBody">
<i>This was intended to be the first installment, but it got
sidetracked. Think of it as an introduction, not a guide, but perhaps it
will explain some. The story, which had kept popping up in my mind for
some time, was prompted by stories....my older relatives, dad, the
uncles and aunts. Life on the Oregon coast in the 30's, 40's and 50's,
and my knowledge of the coast since then. In these stories, my wife
appears in the upriver section, and like the upriver, she's never
vanished. My friend Quinn, died in a boating accident on the Rogue in
'63, chatted with me in a dream once and approved of a description of
the river. You may have to go back to the stories to understand.
Anyway, here 'tis:</i><br />
<br />
<b>River, the beginning</b><i> </i><br />
<br />
I began each day like this, as though it were the last. I know the last
days will be here, where the sun runs into the ocean, that I will see in
a movement of sea birds and hear in the sound of water beating against
the earth what I now only imagine, that the ocean has a sadness beyond
even the sadness of herons, that in the running into it of rivers is the
weeping of the earth for what is lost.<br />
<i> </i><br />
By evening, when confirmation of those thoughts seems again withheld, I
think of going back upriver, up to the log jam, past where the stump is
jammed, or even beyond, to the headwaters, to begin again.<br />
<br />
I will tell you something. It is to the thought of the river's banks
that I most frequently return, their wordless emergence at a headwaters,
the control they urge on the direction of the river, mile after mile,
and their disappearance here on the beach as the river enters the ocean.
It occurs to me that at the very end the river is suddenly abandoned,
that just before it's finished the edges disappear completely, that in
this moment a whole life is revealed.<br />
<br />
It is possible I am wrong. It is impossible to speak with certainty about very much.<br />
<br />
It will not rain for the rest of the day. Lie down here beside me and
sleep. When you awake you will feel the pull of warm winds and wish to
be gone. I will stand somewhere on the beach staring at the breakers,
the scampering of sanderlings, thinking I can hear the distant murmuring
of whales. But I can as easily turn inland, and go upriver.<br />
<br />
When you awake, if you follow the river into the trees up the valley I will be somewhere ahead or beyond, like the herons.<br />
<br />
When you are overwhelmed with feeling, when your fingers brush the soft
skin of a deer-head orchid , or you see a house ahead, near the river
bank beyond the falls, you will know a loss of guile, and the beginning
of the journey.<br />
<br />
Come find me. We have much to see.
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<span class="post-author vcard">
</span>Should Fish Morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18400586203204886095noreply@blogger.com1