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—for my children I see her doing something simple, paying bills, or leafing through a magazine or book, and wish that I could say, and she could hear, that now I start to understand her love for all of us, the fullness of it. It burns there in the past, beyond my reach, a modest lamp.
Copyright © 2011 by David Young. Reprinted from Field of Light and Shadow with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
You'll show that toad-eater who wrote Night Thoughts what's happened in two centuries or so. You'll make your yard the spirit's doorway to metamorphs and comet-lit inventions. Go ahead, walk the cathedral-volumned night.
It's summer, 1956, in Maine, a camp resort on Belgrade Lakes, and I am cleaning fish, part of my job, along with luggage, firewood, Sunday ice cream, waking everyone by jogging around the island every morning swinging a rattle I hold in front of me to break the nightly spider threads. Adlai Stevenson is being nominated, but won't, again, beat Eisenhower, sad fact I'm half aware of, steeped as I am in Russian novels, bathing in the tea- brown lake, startling a deer and chasing it by canoe as it swims from the island to the mainland.