—Well, where do I begin…? (a pause, studying the wall, the window, the dark corner of the room)

—It doesn’t matter, does it? Everything is in everything else. Just… begin!

<drum drum drum, fingers on the table. drumming sounds out of the wood not out of the soul, sounds from somewhere else not out of the soul, waiting for sounds, oh waiting for sounds out of the soul>

—I think you are thinking. Instead: try speaking. Just make a sound. Any sound, then follow sound with sound and before you know it your whole life is laid out here.

– It’s pulling hard!

– Yes, it’s a big one. Don’t jerk the line, just keep…. wow, yes, just keep hold and bring it in slowly…

The line in the boy’s hands bucking and tugging, this way, that way, desperate to escape the fingers. His expression more determined than seven years of puzzles, seven winters, seven pairs of shoes, seven circles around the sun. A case for karma, the man thought, watching.

– Will there be any left?

Stars were falling all around them where they lay, backs against the earth, faces to the sky, in the summer night.

– Stars? Or wishes?

– I have an infinite number of wishes.

– There are an infinite number of stars. Or, at least, there are as many as you can wish in one lifetime.

– I wish, I wish…

– Shhhh, don’t tell or it won’t come true.

Overnight the fog and mist had been met with sudden chill, and every surface, twig and branch, and all the remaining leaves were covered in their contours by a sheet of ice.

– The world is glass, she thought; and she thought: How fragile it seems, as if a clap of thunder would bring it down. But beautiful as it is fragile…

She reached out to a glazed, late-season rose, whose heavy head bowed from the neighbor’s garden, drooping over the fence. She touched it: cold. Is that the look of death, beautifully wrapped in ice?

I sat under the rain and the brim of my hat dripped as eaves drip and through the brim of my hat dripping as eaves I watched the leaves handing those drops heaven to earth one palm at a time, as though breaking the water’s fall. I moved under the skirt of the tree and let her shadow me, the arc of the rain drawing an ephemeral circle where the tree’s limbs reached, and stayed there a while, while the large drops collected above, larger and then larger and then falling with a plash unhindered onto the brim of my hat, as though the eaves had shrunk, or the storm had grown.

– There! Did you see it? – I don’t… think… over by the water? – No no no, down there (look where I’m pointing). OH! It moved again! – I can barely see your hand.

By now the children had returned from the shore and, having been hushed to quiet, came on exaggerated tip-toes to stand behind their parents. What is it? What is it?

– I think it’s a fox or a mink. – A fox! (stage whisper) – What’s a mink? (the fewer the years, the louder the “whisper”) – Quiet, quiet. There’s a little light between those two trees… it must be coming off the water? And every once in a – there!

“The last year I lived there, I had only a blanket between my self and the deep night, my soul was naked to its maker, and its maker told me stories I could not forget and I could not write; I was filled with darkness and with light, with shapes and with sounds that moved within me, now a stampede, now a flight, then a wind so strong I couldn’t keep my feet…

The branching of the Arne River is by this hill where its voice grows adult from upstream child, no longer rippling and eager to overflow in this course or that, but gravity-bound for the north and a great flooding finish, a heavy waterfall managed by Verlag dam; were you here to see the ages change? That stone, wider than the rest, severs left from right channel, seems to halve the river while leaving it quite complete, all rush, boiling to be one again; there’s the damage that makes the flow more determined, cuts the deep bed; later on, past three dry fields and under a county bridge, it joins again, but never with this spirit. I watched birds spinning over a pool; I was waiting for wind to blow loose leaves or seeds to turn several times in that water question then head downstream, as everything does. And, listening to a little water over a few stones I imagined a running child, the same light step, or myself in the water, or the water in me; there is sure to be a common language through these things. I would see the ages change, too. Let someone drop a paper boat up by the mill, and we know nothing of the act, but wrapped here in the autumn chill see it float, white and half-capsized, around that bend, over the spill of tangled logs, into the brief frame this view allows – then around again and out of sight forever. So we could be delighted and puzzled for a while, imagine our own fingers bending paper into that shape, how would it feel to be so young, or young-intentioned, and with such faith that two people involved with the current, away downstream would see the boat and know it for a careful gift. Well, someone may yet do that. Or, we may have to be content with sticks and other wood debris that weather slips into the river, a slight downward-casting scene down from treetops, down from hill heights, down the slope of the land, down to the sea.

Were I to write an historical novel, I would begin with the letters they wrote one another. Begin with their words of the daily, with a thread of love woven around them, then find the works of art that survived the bullets and the winds of time until today: here is a cross, there a mosque. I would look broader, and look wider, by reading academic works, listening for those that by some miracle of honesty escaped retouching by a political pen, escaped the fundamentalist desire that humanity be excluded fro the story.

“What was that!”

They were on the river trail, a few minutes’ walk from the town center: far enough out that traffic noise was hushed and self-absorbed, yet near enough in that the bank of the waterway was tended like a garden, perennials were in bloom, annuals in bud, the grass clipped neat and paths swept clean. Comfortable benches had been placed every so often, that couples might rest in public privacy, leaning together, their words becoming soft and intimate, their breath merging as their thoughts merged.