Windfall has a wild, tough, incalculable highway. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prelude
The flying godwit soars 8000 miles nonstop from Alaska to China’s Yellow River. It’s not its resilience we most admire nor its sheer hardheadedness; it’s the calculus, some chook radar pulling it ahead, a threaded needle, its eye method above water
Winter Work
Waldo waits for the water to freeze earlier than strolling throughout the Nice River to reach in Kalamazoo or wherever subsequent he’ll converse. Even so, the chilliness wind invades his cloak, his scarf, and threatens his gait. He slides. Final week, as he stood tall, affected person, earlier than a crowd someplace, somebody stated he resembled a perpendicular coffin. Properly, sure: hidden behind the consolation of aphorism and the blazing quilt of certainty, his spirit has plummeted, careened from transcendence by the demise of a kid, his personal, the damage seamed into his coronary heart, nonetheless pulsating, one lyceum after one other, by way of one lecture, perhaps two, one other day x’d off the calendar.
An Interlude
Free will, Nabokov writes in a sly and caustic observe, “snaps its rainbow fingers” to dispute our each doubt. Maybe. But we should take into account going this manner or that, the paths tangled the place we least suspect. Generally we’re blown about, buffeted into fearsome lands, labyrinthine folds, no string to sift, no needle to string. Different occasions we really feel we’re saved, borne up on spirit we neither know nor perceive.
Spring
Each spirit makes its home, however afterwards the home confines the spirit. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
After the heavy rains, a pinch of sunshine by way of the timber, after which a vibrant seam of colour because the night swells sturdy, a nice suture of solar and calm.
The scholar sits nonetheless, as if earlier than an altar, to what god he doesn’t know. The outdated robes don’t match: they’re yesterday’s selections and a bit threadbare. When one’s phrases are etched into platitude, embroidered as reality, is one not sure and gagged and misplaced? What an odd knot within the golden thread of a life exemplary to a fault!
A Postlude, Lightsome
Lidian, spouse of Waldo, who referred to as him Mr. E for half a century, could be deemed a sentimental idiot: In concern for a rat caught within the chimney she positioned bread and cheese there. She so fretted that her chickens’ ft had been chilly in these northern winters (even her personal blanket did not heat their scaly toes), that her graceless buddy Henry David, ever adept at building, stitched for them leather-based footwear.
