12.21.2016

making me want to drive after it and hear it forever

Here I have heard the snorting of hogs trying to re-enter the underearth.
Here I came into the curve too fast, on ice, and touched the brake and sailed into the pasture.
Here I stopped the car and snoozed while two small children crawled all over me.
Here I reread Moby Dick, skimming big chunks, in a single day, while Maud and Fergus fished.
Here I abandoned the car because of a clonk in the motor and hitchhiked (which in those days in Vermont meant walking the whole way with a limp) all the way to a garage where I passed the afternoon with ex-loggers who had stopped by to oil the joints of their artificial limbs and talk.
Here a barn burned down to the snow. "Friction," one of the ex-loggers said. "Friction?" "Yup, the mortgage, rubbing against the insurance policy."
Here I went eighty but was in no danger of arrest, for I was "blessed speeding"--trying to get home in time to see my children before they slept.
Here I bought speckled brown eggs with bits of straw shitted to them.
Here I brought home in the back seat two piglets who rummaged inside the burlap sack like pregnancy itself.
Here I heard on the car radio Handel's concerto for harp and lute, for the second time in my life, which Inés played to me the first time, making me want to drive after it and hear it forever.
Here I sat on a boulder by the winter-steaming river and put my head in my hands and considered time--which is next to nothing, merely what vanishes, and yet can make one's elbows nearly pierce one's thighs.
Here I forgot how to sing in the old way and listened to frogs at dusk.
Here the local fortune teller took my hand and said, "What is still possible is inspired work, faithfulness to a few, and a last love, which, being last, will be like looking up and seeing the parachute dissolving in a shower of bright light."
Here is the chimney standing up by itself and falling down, which tells you you approach the end of the road between here and there.
Here I arrive there.
And I must turn around and go back and on the way back look to left and to right and look for any spaces not yet used up.

[Galway Kinnell {1927-2014}, 'The Road Between Here and There', from 3 Books]

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