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26 partial eclipse / n 46.677, w 114.244 A friend’s early death had me thinking about death, as did the plastic toy stegosaur I ran over with the mower when the sputtering engine and day’s umber finality had me thinking along similar lines. This is the way it goes with death, I heard me telling myself in a voice I have developed over the years to cope with such situations though I don’t trust so much as resign to it. C was crushed while skiing the backcountry when a mid-June avalanche unseated the peak he’d stared at from his kitchen window several hours prior while fixing a breakfast of toast and venison as the room filled with dawn’s initial hue and the slight hiss of butter losing its shape in the skillet. What one does so early in the day is one’s own business—I delivered newspapers as a boy and prefer to let a decent hour arrive before waking. Today though Molly startled me at 4:37 screaming I want you, Daddy, and as I held her until the offending dream gave way to some less threatening vision, the eclipsing moon I declined to set an alarm for appeared between the curtains: as much moon as I have in my thumbnail, silver handle by which some god held a pail filled with water drawn from the cosmos’s deepest well. I stepped outside in time to see the vast mouth swallow all but the last slice of pear. Blood rush of the creek, the robins’ somnolent calls a deafening surround to these thoughts, which a sizeable portion 27 of me would have preferred to sleep through, all but the top of my head, the urnful I will be, buried warmly under the quilts. Momentarily the snowy peak on which he left his body arrived in daylight. Or daylight arrived on the peak. They met, made a horizon line, and said nothing of how at dusk in June up there one might see a nighthawk drop from an invisible precipice, the edges of its wings audibly sawing the ozone, slitting a seam in the void into which he slipped. ...

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