“
Now reading
Begin, Distance
The morning stars are a torment, if you thought long enough, and yet how much more unsettling is the reason you have gone to the window in the first place. Look what they do to the landscape. You can see them standing in that certain detail, like a sun-lit field full of children learning to dance. Each one shining just so. Or like a set of distinctions impossible to take in. So that the sky expands outward, and each time you almost lose yourself, thinking of water, in all directions. Up to a point you can only imagine them, because the eye plays past its own hysteria, which is the same thing as saying to yourself: but think of the risk. And we expect to live out these moments to their end, to the point of greatest intensity, except the fields are. And the trees still arrive there before us constructing, out of fragments, the way it would feel: what tipped the weeds that way beside the pond-edge; why is that shadow shaped like a glove; who stunned the cattle into motion... Only this time it's impossible- so completely have I given up the idea of the mountains' isolation, and my own, which is like applause beneath those stars. And there is a woman who resembles this landscape though it never occurred to me until now, her deepening meadow, the burdens of space, or how I might say we finally met, stranded in the grass, the last green thing in Iowa. Still, what bothers me more is the sudden concussion of the snow-line where the semblance is unnatural, and asking please-which makes me love it more- and where, you'll say, no wonder the birds flew away, and so on, assuming it's that other condition, the one I can never conceal, the one you call wilderness, though it might be anything. We're in no danger. That much is like a plane of sunlight shimmering on the horizon. It's just the possibility we're giving in -I don't know how-to some exquisite emotion. As if none of this really happened at all, down to the last negligible star, or the low sun shifting the fields, or the woman receding into the trees-and why wasn't she more fully realized so close to the window?