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The Return
- University of Illinois Press
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71 The Return A man—from the snowy corridor of a mountain of pines, from the heart of that wilderness—a man walks toward me. And the ravens fly out from behind him. He has disturbed their roost, their silent motionless perch and now they rage past him like a funnel widening out, cawing, beating their wings, a deafening funnel of black, he at its center, walking toward me. He has come back for me. He calls my name through the hole in his throat. His head is held on by a white bandage knotted tightly about the wound. After the birds subside, he unbuttons his Ālthy tartan shirt. With both hands, he grasps his sternum and wrenches, by the bone, his chest open like a glass cabinet before me. For a second, nothing happens. I look in, holding up my miniature binoculars. I want to see the menagerie of animals I had put there, so many beautiful animals painted with the Ānest brush tips, down to a single horse hair flecked with a bead of paint: Winsor green, cadmium yellow, manganese violet, 72 quinacridone rose red deep— The animals themselves of glass and clay and jade and pewter. Wood and china. Some blown while liquid, some sculpted out from their blocked materials, some dug up from the earth, and one I found on the wooded path— And from his chest, instead, from its deep center, Ārst the raucous cries roused from sleep, then the beating of wings, like the whole earth quaked against me, and then the ravens pouring outward from the source. What do you want, I ask. Are more ravens in those ravens’ hearts? ...