PARADELLE ANTHOLOGY

Years Away: Paradelle for Diminishment

29 Catherine Carter Years Away: Paradelle for Diminishment Years away, for nights at a time, invisible birds wept whippoorwill. Years away, for nights at a time, invisible birds wept whippoorwill. All to the lost and tenor dark, whippoorwill, we whistled back. All to the lost and tenor dark, whippoorwill, we whistled back. All away back to the invisible year’s dark, we wept for time and tenor lost, nights of whistling birds: whippoorwill, whippoorwill. Years away, shoals of mussels ploughed the pebbles of the river bed. Years away, shoals of mussels ploughed the pebbles of the river bed. Bluegills, scaled and glinting, nipped them broken-shelled from our hands. Bluegills, scaled and glinting, nipped them broken-shelled from our hands. The broken mussel shells glinting, scaled bluegill nip the pebbles for beds from the ploughed shoals, our hands years away from them. Almost no one alive remembers the years of shad runs now, that, how many? came. Almost no one alive remembers the years of shad runs now, that, how many? came. Years since they surged up the river, when the shallows seethed away at their splash. Years since they surged up the river, when the shallows seethed away at their splash. How many alive remember the shad coming up? seethe and surge at these shallow years when almost no one runs to their rivers? Years away, now, that splash. Almost no one seethes and weeps for nights and years of birds, rivers’ surge, the shad runs coming, shoals of pebbles, whippoorwills (that whistling’s scaled tenor! whippoorwill) mussels’ shells, the bluegills’ nip and splash away in glinting riverbeds—for the almost lost to our hands, all alive then. How many? Broken now, invisible in time ploughed up from them, from years back. We remember, years away. ...