Blame the rude lift of shaggy grasses in the hot breath of wind, or blame the running horses for allowing our approach, or the unknown forces hiding behind facades of lifelessness, the array of them unlimited as the wild of fallen feathers in the last song of the dreariness we pretended to know before the brooding effigies of childhood toys wept us forward to long-dormant animal screams, to be caught by the insouciant tongue of this luxuriant lush where bur clumps catch the skin and horseflies shine mad at midday against a chorus of swarms convulsing at the grate.
Blame this teasing glimpse of spring for returning these creatures to something more than what we were in our cold rooms of polite decorum, before our days shed silver scales to this teeming fever, to reveal the honeysweet fire of protuberant growth, dripping conduits of some fierce insistence too raw to submit to any address more refined than the primordial word for teasing us back into this unnamed all.
That’s like early Cormac McCarthy that first line! Love the density there and rhythm, a lot of S’s I picked up. Like the sound of that tall grass swaying in the wind.
Bill, as someone who has long adored early McCarthy, this is high praise and I am so grateful to you for sharing! : )
Maybe you can help me understand what happened in The Orchard Keeper then? Read the whole thing and couldn’t tell you. Something about a porch falling off the edge of a foundation I think. But super cool writing ha ha! Sorry, being cheeky here.
Laughing out loud here, Bill. I think that I rarely ended a McCarthy book (Orchard Keeper included) being confident that I had a clear sense of what had happened. The few where I did, I found way less interesting. Perhaps I was drawn to the way he could so confidently evoke this sense of absolute unknowing. I never thought of the attraction this way until now : ) Thanks for helping me see it!
I feel a bit less daft now, thanks for that. Fist bump.
Fist bump with enthusiastic yes! : )