The Linnet's Wings Summer 2014 | Page 76

On my uncle, on his sun-blistered shoulders and arms, moist and exhausted, I performed my little innocent operations. We weren’t supposed to know about them back then, my sister and I, and now they are everywhere, comical in their marches and reminiscences; I almost feel sorry for them, their iron jewelry, their bald heads, with their aversion to hybrids and a predilection for accounting. Why not imagine that light just as the poet did, after death, after all things material, like enamel or porcelain or even more neutral: not even sugar is untouched in this regard, with the bones used to bleach its appearance. But a longer journey, through root and vessel, shoe leather and nail, and into the filing cabinet where the records cook and bubble over into the bright eternal.