A Path Through . . .

(Found here ) For Edward on his Fiftieth There’s winter in a closed book, a dormancy of hidden words, a pre-dawn impossibility to the beckoning image in the title. With a new book the crisp pages are thin ice cracking in springtime, the clear current of the story just beginning to make itself visible. I love the birdsong in a first line, the wake-up sense of stretching on the right hand page, the imperceptible sense of a new season breathed into a landscape, a character, a chapter, things beginning to flit from branch to branch, the first lazy drift of a bee toward the flowers as the story opens and suddenly in the concentrated listening, the warm arc of the sun is right on your neck, as you sit in the garden reading and receiving the life giving rays, arriving all the way from far out in the darkness, charged and made benevolent by the atmosphere of blue and the shade of trees and the birdsong surrounding your concentration on a story, a dream, a drama, a life come alive on the page, ...