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228 f r o m g o u r d s e e d c a r o l i n a s i l v e r b e l l s for Milner and June Ball Out in the meadow beside the house to give coffee water time to boil, to check closer on the Carolina Silverbells in bloom that friends identified for me yesterday, so I can say their names too when I see them somewhere else, here’s a big turtle like a so obviously placed gift package where I couldn’t possibly miss it, right in my no-path through the tall weeds. The hinged front third of his bottom plate closes with a wet hiss as I pick him up. Thirty minutes closed on this wooden table with me, coffee cup and spiral notebook, he opens a half-inch, puts one back-right, black-lagoon suit, lizardfoot down, eases his phenomenal, strong head out from under the eaves. No eyes. They are thickly cataracted over with layers of film. He tries once with the back of each foot to clear his vision, like a cat washing. He does have the clean, minutely drilled, twin holes of his nostrils. He stretches and points them in three directions. Now he lunges quickly away from me off the edge of the table. I catch him. He can see slightly out of his left eye. When I am within arm’s reach of an animal, I think of St. Francis. Animals gauge my restlessness. I want them more comfortable with me than they are. St. Francis, so empty of fear and hasty nervousness the birds would light on him. Turtles probably wouldn’t slam shut when he picked them up. I put this one back where I found him/her—him, there is the small dent in the stomach-plate for balancing in the act of copulation—and go on trying to identify Silverbells . Trunk and branches small and twisty like dogwood. Why learn the names? If I don’t, this place remains a green fog in my mind. I’m told the spirits sometimes do not know who they are at amateur séances, when they are called forth by someone not ready to do that. You ask,“Is this Shakespeare? Aunt Edith?” And the spirits say yes, because they are in a blurry limbo where they actually are nobody, and everyone. Names do matter. The Druids had a tree alphabet that has been lost, but evidently, in it, each letter denoted the essence of a particular kind of tree—the hemlock, the black tupelo, the white oak. Think of spelling words with those reminders of tree-essence. It is friendlier to have signs for the clear and separate beings of plant and amateur botanist, each living spirit like St. Francis. These blossoms here are white, hanging straight down, little 229 f r o m g o u r d s e e d Tiffany Victorian reading lamps. The turtle is out walking again, already, with his misted-over, translucent will, and his lefthand slit of place coming through one eye. I read about St. Francis and trees, and then there is this figuring work to be done. I might have thought one time that classifying was distancing. There is some separateness to naming. But past thumbing through Southern Trees to page eighty-four there is this Black Tupelo (I think), with me for months, and now I have a term for this presence. Did St. Francis know the names? Probably not. He knew nicknames and spirit-names. It takes so many forms. Studying the differences is trying to join with that clear sap of intelligence, a kind of show-off devotion , while we wait for the true word to open. ...

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