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Natural History
- University of Iowa Press
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Packets of light, glances without faces, dart between leaves where we gather the horse bones somebody left behind. A dust of nothing in particular kicks up. It swirls in the angled light in this life-size diorama, billows around our feet like translucent blood. The dust happens a thousand times, clouds our eyes till we’re blind with seeing nobody. It’s a surface we walk into, a statement we inspect the ground for. Tooth and jawbone. The dead bleached of all desire. In the aftermath, a dog barks in the subdivision, a train howls. Space rearranges, trees leave out the ocean, its wrinkling and peeling (the first settlers could see it from here). Skunks watch. Poison slithers behind the cloak of trees (smiling, we think). The wind rushing in our dry ears is nobody walking westward still, dust of nothing in particular kicking up. natural history Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. — Thomas Paine [ 28 ] ...