But I keep coming back to talk of the season, the glissando of rain coaxing the last few million leaves from the last few thousand limbs that still bare them. Or the time we went to hear the singing of Schubert songs, and there in the middle of some up-rushing splendor of notes, the laughter came and came till we snorted, the joy almost choking us. I'd say a few words about the color of the rocks in the river we followed out of there, about the piping of those tiny gray river-pipers we stopped an hour to watch in the daylight's bright lull. But I promised to stick to the matter at hand, as though one of those rocks, one of those piping pipers weren't part of it, weren't even the whole resonant thing. I know so little about it, love, young as I am, stupid and inarticulate.
Rivers know much more.
Rocks the rivers gleam over know. I think we should listen to what they say, the names of the world caught and returned, the way we'd listen to an old Rabbi rocking and muttering at his booth on the corner, or even to some drunk, rough-tweeded Irish sage, careening on his bicycle down any Wicklow hill. So I'll offer great praise to the glory of maps, the geography of bodies, the whole terrain of listening. Praise to the mapping and naming of all these countries we invent as we go, stumbling into them, crushed and dazed with the local wine. I hope you have a sense of what I mean by this, of what I want to say.