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74 Incest The birds said nothing all night long. What was I expecting? Some sort of news about the future of feathers? Gossip about the goings on in some farmer’s far field where the jays and swallows are at it again? I admit it. I expect a message from something that isn’t me or even like me. No feathers, no paper, no paragraphs parading over one page after another. The message started coming to me again last October in the Tetons, with the Grand One itself hovering surrealistically in an icy gray sky, and that other great hunkerer, Mt. Moran, peeling the late light from its face: a visceral quality of silence due maybe to six inches of fresh snow laid down overnight or maybe to the rawness of rock and pine. Or to some hopeful state of mind that has haunted me all of my life: The birds are talking now but still say nothing, and these words of mine are equally nil. I lean in this doorway and forget the done and the undone of inside and outside. A crossbreeze unsettles the dust that drifts before me in a ray of light, each particle seeking its brother or sister. ...

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