“The curve of the river is where the breeze comes freshest. You can hear the leaves find voice before each gust arrives, like an invisible wave reaching upstream, downstream. On this bank is the small shore, because the arm of water hooks around us here, an embrace. The far bank is the long shore: from here you can see it’s slow progress.

“I come to think. Sometimes I come here not to think. The place seems not to mind the face I put on, at any rate whatever face I brought is put away soon enough. So long as you’re quiet, the small sounds work their way into you and fill you up, so the burden you decided to drag along with you that day is rained-on, then water-logged, then sinks into the slowness of the current.

“One day I fell asleep down below that sumac. The grass grows in fine threads there – never learned the reason for it, but always seems to be invitingly true. I was thinking and then not thinking, and then I was barely knowing, and finally whatever part of me was trying to hold onto day just let go. I suppose everything around, all of this, made its way into my dreams: ears certainly do not stop when your eyes close. And the fingers still have touch, the nose can define smells… dead is dead and who needs to know anything more then? Asleep, though… is simply paying less attention.

“Suddenly – how long had I been sleeping? – it was as though I arrived on the scene just after something had happened. Just after a cannon had fired and all of its echoes had already faded away. Just after a grand flight of migrating geese had flown over at dusk, silent except for the whistle of their wings. Or a congregation had jostled out of morning service, chatting and smiling and refreshed, had gone home, the candles’ smoke dissipated, the bells’ vibration stilled, the guild-women having cleared the flowers’ sweet perfume from the vases, the pastor having remove his robe and his Office, having shut away his papers and books, locked the door, and turned toward home. The church of course remained.

“I took a deep breath and opened my eyes with fog yet in them. I saw a heron poised in the shallows. The crickets had begun to speak about evening. My leg flickered annoyance where a mosquito had alighted. There was the lightest lemon scent from the sumac. I turned from my side to my back. There was a stick, so I shifted my hips.

“Then I noticed… while I had slept, someone had put a small pillow under my head…”

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