I have often taken refuge with your tribe just to escape the hubbub of my tribe. But what kind of life is that? We all fly home together at the end of the day. If we could sustain and organize our cruelty we'd rule the world. We can be cruel, but never for very long. We argue and tease and wrangle and goof and fly upside down. Sometimes I think to be Asin would be the saddest thing in the world. She was as free as anyone ever could be and she was trapped. She wanted something but she never knew what it was so she had nothing. You could hear her crying sometimes when the sun went down. She would listen to women talking by the fire or working in the village or gathering berries but if they invited her to join them she ran away. She would grab children who wandered too far alone in the woods but she would return them to the same spot after three days and run away again. She would grab men who were fishing alone and make love to them and then throw them down on the ground and run away weeping. She was never satisfied or content and so she ran and ran and ran. When the wind changed direction suddenly that was Asin. When you saw dunegrass rippling in a line she was running through it. She had wild long hair and she was very tall and she ran like the wind. If you saw her running you had to run to water as fast as you could and drink or her restlessness would come into you like a thirst that could never be quenched. Asin couldn't bear being married or having children or having friends. “Did I ever tell you about Asin? She is the wild woman of the woods. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. My wife's eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sound of my daughters typing their papers for school. Weeds forcing their way through sidewalks. The way my father's face shone right after he shaved. The way my children smelled after their baths when they were little. Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer. The way barbers sweep up circles of hair after a haircut. Smoked fish and the smokehouses where fish are smoked. The way a heron labors through the sky with such a vast elderly dignity. The green sifting powdery snow of cedar pollen on my porch every year. Postcards on which the sender has written so much that he or she can barely squeeze in the signature. The shivering ache of a saxophone and the yearning of a soprano. Sleep in every form from doze to bone-weary. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart. My children's hands when they cup my face in their hands. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. My wife's voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. “These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.” When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. We are utterly open with no one, in the end - not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment.
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