“Actually I was thinking all this also on the walk, listening how the birds wove the twilight into a tent, all their night music becoming an actual fabric of caring. I mean the whole landscape was mapped in it, each song a patchwork and all of them one fabric. I’m not being metaphoric here. [So she says and yet she talks so.] The sounds actually took on the patterns of the sundry darknesses. Near and far all the signifying world was caught up in caring before the dark: distant frogs sounding like hot water bottles, june bugs blindly helicoptering—even the scritch of my walking shoes on the gravel—everywhere the dark caring of the anonymous world bedding down. (Have you ever thought how much of the world does not have names? Instead they have these songs.)”
At the edge of the tangle in the great shadow under the witches oak a deer snorted and I saw him there, faintly amber in the growing darkness, staring at me over his broad back. Scritch onward til he disappears behind. Then comes the rhythm of crickets. With them light fading.
They are sitting in the darkness of the screen porch at twilight, one alone, one dying. Each one each. Why didn’t you let me die? How ever did this happen to us?