Red Clay Weather

Given Distance,

—25 Given Distance, music can make anything sound true. Someone said Those toppled pines are wrath, and someone said He is the hand: voices are always attributing me, this or that to me they’ve never seen. It makes it hard to find myself, like window glass seen through, that brittle, quick to shatter, smear, or blur. Nurse says she recognizes me in light’s edict crossing the lake like a messenger whose voice is fire in the unheard distance (like a messenger whose hand is fire grasping circumstance): light lies beside her like a faithful animal, but light lies. My child doesn’t remember me, shadowless in a shadow world; light passes through her as though she were glass, no trace of her passing through those fleeting scenes. The grass is in need, the sowers are hidden, she must return soon. Have I doubt like a flaw in a diamond, have I the conviction of a wind that has permanently died down? I could keep her adrift in cupped palms, I am the hand that was. It holds the memory of arranging light’s business with the variable landscape, a clump of trees receding into green shepherd text-2.indd 25 11/22/10 2:07 PM —26 and shimmer, a little ripple of lake in the distance. All this that’s been poured into me can see me disappearing, chooses not to. shepherd text-2.indd 26 11/22/10 2:07 PM ...