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we skimmed across the glade, weed parting air---shhh, shhh, shhh. As if anything needed to be said. But it did---does. F'rinstance, when canoe floated still, weed was silent, yet the air was still there. No sooner would i lift a paddle then the echoes came again: shhh, shhh. Did our passage cause so much disturbance? Why admonish only motion? Seeking out the hush was like stopping to try and hear the sound of footsteps which turn out to be my own...so that every time I pause to listen, footsteps pause also. That was not all. Not at all what color is the rush anyway? Sometimes lovely evergreen. Other times it seemed as though a fire raging recently, had charred the weed. And left behind a thousand burned-out sparkler spikes to poke their heads above the water's face. I reached my hands out, to feel sooty charcoal stalks. But (magic) they were found to be still green and supple and smooth. |
curiouser and curiouser: time and space in duckweed world is not the same as what I know. a trick of movement sunlight upon water iridescent strands of copper pearls shimmer from behind an endlessly shifting gauze curtain--- the shadows of the weeds. This vision strange and wondrous but like the haunting whispers, or narcissus trying hard to touch the beauteous visage before him, each time I slowed the canoe to look, the lustrous bronze would vanish, and plain old spike rush---sooty or green, remained---leaving me astonished. a long and hot monotonous day broken only by a couple of the ever-present spiders, one churlish crow and a green-backed heron, doing its excellent impression of a shrub. In no way tiresome because the mystery of the spike rushes sensory teasing, perceptions so fleeting. Even now, I do not trust what I saw or heard. shhh, shhh, shhh. |
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