And the next one that I'm going to read is in honor of-- it's
actually two years to the day-- or was
written about an event two years to the day ago.
And I know that because the first line is "your birthday
tomorrow" and then referencing my husband John Melillo.
And tomorrow is going to be his birthday
again, two years later.
So this is Whitewater Draw for John, and for all of you.
And some of you might know Whitewater Draw is this--
the conservation area not too far south from here,
which is a site for--
the migratory site for sandhill cranes.
Whitewater Draw.
"Your birthday tomorrow.
We drove down with my parents, got out just
as the light was beginning to fade.
The baby asleep, we shifted her gently as we could,
but still she woke, cried, was hushed back to sleep.
My parents walked ahead toward the look off.
We followed.
Took turns straining through the set of government binoculars
mounted on the boardwalk rail.
When I looked, everything seemed to blink in and out of focus
as if I was examining a dream I was having about birds, where
birds stood in for something more
complex, impossible to define.
You can always feel it, the moment
she falls back to sleep when you're carrying her.
A subtle shift in weight and pressure.
The next morning I wrote on the back of a postcard
I'd picked up years ago.
A series of 12 frames from Eadweard Muybridge,
Horse Walking Free.
How we always imagine time like that, as stalled moments.
And although probably it's true that it
exists like that in some sense, if only because we imagine
that it does, really, I wrote, everything
is always escaping in between.
My ambition-- I don't remember if I wrote this down--
is not to attempt any longer, just stall time.
Or second guess its impulse, which,
for lack of a better word, is always forward.
Always past and through the ambitions of the mind
or of the body, or whatever it is that seeks
to stop it or slow it down.
As in, we didn't know that the birds would
fly until they actually did.
Slowly at first, one by one.
And then all at once.
A dark mass on the horizon above the irrigated field.
From a distance, they appeared a black swirl.
In themselves, a landscape.
But when they drew near, they flew singly or in small groups.
Just as clouds appear in the distance, dripping with rain
that will never actually reach the ground.
Or mountains appear as a single shape, rather than
the innumerable small gestures made
by rock against the pressure of millions of years.
Though even to speak of millions of years
is a euphemism of sorts, used in order to express, what exactly?
The way that all things that exist,
exist in relation to single moments?
In some sense of the Holy?
Of what exists beneath or beyond all of this somehow?
Of what beyond a stubborn insistence upon the particular,
simply exists is eternal in the way that the sleep of a baby
is eternal.
Always, that is, just about to be interrupted.
Like the air the beating of wings might at any moment
redirect.
The whole way home my mother in the back seat,
we might easily have turned a moment too soon.
Everything occurs like this, reminding you
of something else.
Perhaps life itself occurs in this way.
As a metaphor for something which is also itself.
And everything from what is visible and known,
birds, and mountains in the distance,
and patterns of wind to be invisible motives
and directions of life and love is always.
Into a moment of which we can only
say afterward that it might never have arrived.
Arriving.
Creating only the impression of stillness.
Of there having been a moment at all.
Perhaps everything slips.
Is slipping even now.
Is utterly free.
But at such a distance, such a distance."