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Show BURNING THE FIELDS It's three weeks to autumn, and ash is drifting through the nearby hills-ash and a sunset blaze rising off the grass around the poplar trees, which are rising, too, like smoke and light, but rising, all the same, with that pang of desire which today has turned you away from the fields: as if, while walking this morning down the levee road, it occurred to you the sky was darkening for a reason now, a reason much more than the grass on fire, but like something in the heart, a star, for example, rising like a spark through the kindling air. But now the wind has carried the fields this way, in this sense we speak of, seeing ourselves at the center of things, even our illusions: like looking out a window and finding there the same face that years ago, climbing a fence at dawn, awakened the dogs barking across that flood of burn in the sky...It's the way we believe the world contains some larger image of ourselves, as though the burning meant to explain, somehow, the way it feels to feel this way, to distinguish one moment from another until all that remains is a little word, like "love" or "pain," settling on the air around us. And look, today, how the smoke conceals so many details that could mean the same, how the sunlight gutters in the topmost leaves, how your reflection remains though you have turned from the glass. And consider, as well, how all this time I've been sitting inside writing long letters in which I scarcely even mention such things-or that flush |