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TRAGIC VISION AND BEYOND
Is that the full moon and its dark bruise-like markings, or the shadow of a man in a slouch hat with crumpled brim looking in at our blackness through a round window beyond which lies a flat buckwheat-flour light? There's really no question: simply, the one it is "looks like," "reminds me of" the one it's not. It's as though some great hunter who was also a great singer sang: "I lay in wait all of a night and a day and a night for the young deer to move, trying not to fall into a dream of her sweet fat. Then I could wait no longer: was she a demon, never blinking, stiller than a rock? I notched my arrow and crept up, waiting for her to bound beyond me, tasting the disappointment to come if she should sniff me too soon. But she never stirred and I came close enough to grab her heart in my fist. She was just shadow among the tree trunks and all my strength against sleep had been for nothing. I was asleep and dreaming from the start. I the hunter was a dream my hunger had, a dead stock standing in the forest a night and a day and a night." And his song was deeply loved, the most intoxicating song, but now there's no one left who knows it because his whole race, all twenty of the people, died the end of that summer in the drought.