#15 winter solstice 2014

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I got home as the sun was setting and walked to the pond. I felt as if I had been cheated out of my allotment of daylight so I decided to light our mid-field brush pile in the still evening. As the fire ignited, the light opened our field as if it were a botanical dictionary page. The time by the fire extended my hour outside as the deepening twilight opened its vast vocabulary of dark hues to which I do not know how to assign language.

15 winter 14.jpgThe swallows and bats at their night work.

And I at mine. [...]

No voices of children, no alphabet in the wind:

Only this silence, the strict gospel of silence,

                                                                            to greet me,

Opened before me like a rare book.

I turn the first page

                               and then the next, but understand nothing.


The deepening twilight a vast vocabulary

I've never heard of.

I keep on turning, however:

                                                somewhere in here, I know, is my word.

Charles Wright, from "A Journal of the Year of the Ox," in Zone Journals (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988)

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