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Seventeen
- University Press of Colorado
- Chapter
- Additional Information
47 seventeen No matter how you long to feel them melt on your tongue, the white petals falling in the dog days of August will never turn to snow. This is one of the things you wanted to tell him, that he had shown you how to see this impossible blossoming. But he had his own flat earth, his own blindness. At five, bouncing in a dune buggy full of spilled beer and cheap binoculars, he had wondered—if men crawled across the face of the moon like ants on a slice of white bread, why couldn’t he see them? Years later, a man propped against the post office wall with a can of beer said boy, you got awfully hard eyes. No matter how many of his stories you recorded in your notebook, thinking you were solving a puzzle— who he was, what had made him who he was—you hardly had to know him. What you loved was your own face turned to the sky, your own mouth open. ...