God sends his tasks and one does them or not, but the sky delivers its gifts at the appointed times: With spit and sigh, with that improbable burst of flame, the balloon comes over the cornfield, bringing another country with it, bringing from a long way off those colors that are at first the low sound of a horn, but soon are many horns, and clocks, and bells, and clappers and your heart rising to the silence in all of them, a silence so complete that the heads of the corn bow back before it and the dog flees in terror down the road and you alone are left gazing up at three solemn visitors swinging in a golden cage beneath that unbelievable chorus of red and white, swinging so close you cannot move or speak, so close the road grows wet with light, as when the sun flares, after an evening storm and you become weightless, falling back in the air before the giant oak that with a fiery burst the balloon just clears.
From To the Place of Trumpets, published by Yale University Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.