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82 The Last White-Throated Sparrow of May Such depths as can be sounded only at heights. It goes like this and this and this voice of a straw all the while the profiles of the dunes scatter. These profiles may be signatures, lineaments, ancestral and monumental, but they all scatter. Meanwhile , like every bird on earth this last straggler, most of the time, remains quiet. But when it breaks the silence it makes one and one and one and one, etc., glad and sorry that all of this must be given thanks, must be written just so. O, we will find fault with paradise. It rebukes us. Its aspen speak without having to stop in the distance to hear themselves back there, like a stand of Eurydices. Being here a little while would seem to be a matter of staying still and being in motion or staying still and watching, or vocalizing earth from the highest reaches of a dead cedar all the way across a shore and over a lake where no tree roots, no nests hold. This is the sound of the last white throat of the woods and this is going to stop far short of any return to its origin, far short of any original farewell. This is ever beyond saying so, beyond song. ...

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