Sublime

A healthy forest must need dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds turn them to use, and small mammals, and more forms of insects lodge and dine on them than science has ever counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data.

It was impossible to tell if they were protecting her, changing her, or breaking her body down—just as I could not know whether some version of the anthropologist had indeed appeared to the surveyor near base camp after I had left for the lighthouse …

tenuous

I never did find out what happened to him the night before the morning he went out and blew his trumpet instead of his bugle, blew and blew a song that grew out of him in extended notes that called for the rising of us not out of our beds but out of our bodies. I can’t explain it well, you never can with music. I can say the notes were long and