Hungry Moon

Where Sadness Comes From

11 where sadness comes from Your father hunting pheasant in the fields behind the house, you and your brother waving sticks in your hands, one of the barn cats pouncing on mice in the stubbled furrows like swells of a frozen ocean— your father hunting grouse in the Wisconsin woods, you and your brother old enough for guns slung over your shoulders as you pass between a cliff stratified like a book and a creek so full and fast its echo throbs, a machine in the rock— you and your brother like wind in a stand of leafless birch, surprised how little force it takes to push the trunks over, how tall they are—twenty feet, thirty— and the sound of their crashing—rootless, overlapping, white poles with blank scrolls of bark, black knots of missing branches. ...