No Witnesses by Paul Monette

Author:Paul Monette [Monette, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7376-8
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-02-22T16:25:00+00:00

Come Spring

I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.”

—Emerson, Thoreau

I

It would make a man pencil-shy, almost,

to hear Thoreau’s hard breathing at the end

when, like a miner, he retreated to

the wet house of his winter lungs. The air

was radared, particled with graphite dust

thrown off in fashioning the tool that can’t

cut wood or core holes in a post. We write

in ink if we have something good to say,

but if the family trade is pencils, then

one works with one’s resources. And Thoreau

was a wizard in the business. Also

like a miner he had picked the outer

shell, to go to the hard part, the long night

seeded after the summer green. Who did

not die in the old days of some bad air?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.