Saturday, July 10, 2004

Yesterday we sat out on a blanket trying to both forget and remember our lives at the same time. Usually it's by drink, but today it was by fiction. We were reading. That fiction is just as bad came to mind: sucking me in, soul obliterationg, just one more chapter please, or until I pass out in sleep, until it's too much and the words blur and jump off the page and I can't take it and have to look away.

The sun was setting, and the straw-like grass of summer, undernourished itself, was poking up through the thin dirty sheet we sat on. We wanted to eat but there was nothing but crackers, and we wanted to drink, but we only had water. The fiction was pulling us under like a water bound beast, and we decided not to jump in anymore, not even to wade, as it was becoming too dangerous.

And so we looked up at the tree, the dead one at the edge of the marsh which is covered in poison ivy and grape weed. The top branches that jut like skeleton fingers out of the bushy poison vines are in the last sun of the day, and sitting there are five green herons, now six, now eight. They sit like hunched monks soaking in the sun, squawking their high pitched shreiks every so often, rearranging iridescent purple feathers, hopping to lower or higher branches, stretching their brown and white, striped and speckled necks, looking like ladies trying on exotic feathered gloves, making that sound, that odd sound that only they make, a cross between a yawn and the croak of the green frog.

As slowly, and as deliberately, and as randomly as they landed, they just the same started to lift their tightly folded wings, stir the air and fly away, leaving us alone in the twilight, wanting to be with them, wanting to be them, wanting to eat frogs, and stay still for hours on end, wanting to have necks like ladies' thin long wrists, wanting to have what seems like effortless lives, wanting to fly.

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