Where the curve of the road rhymes with the reservoir’s and cleared of the leafy veils that for six months obscured it, the landscape's wet chestnut in the gray descended cloud intones You’re lucky to live in a watershed so no vast tracts of tacky drywall turn the land into peremptory enclosures. You’ve bought in. The venial sin: being exceptional. Reading Hölderlin. And the natural hallucinogen of joy helium-cum-oxygen leaving wordy outputs hanging on piney tenterhooks while all the wild protected liminal woods contrive a blind.
From Shoulder Season by Ange Mlinko. Copyright © 2010 by Ange Mlinko. Used by permission of Coffee House Press: www.coffeehousepress.org.