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.
The 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)
The 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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