We learn to include, include, nothing is sacred, all fair game for these rudimentary stabs, pastel-thrusts, not of meaning, probably not of art, more likely of pleasure, in the shape of facts so often overlooked. In the hour s meridian, we smudge our deliberate smudges, our own recognizable, ancestral bodings, leaf-clumps we have carried within from the seed of our own planting, figures for knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge, as the mind twists upward and outward, away from itself, craving the sun, yet poised with the earth s curve, seeing and scene, in the welter of green of its mixing. Return to contents. Blue Spring by Katherine Jackson for Amy Clampitt Limestone country palmetto, tupelo, longleaf pine. Underground, a connected freshwater hydrology fends off the invasion of salt.
Natural springs feed the river which flows north, deposits equable waters in the intemperate sea.
When a kingfisher dives moss drapes the live-oak boughs that lean over the current ripples ring, gradual, silver, concentrically rocking. All year they seep from aquifers, form shallow pools, clear, blue-green, and here the manatee loll, waiting out winter, nosing downriver to munch water plants, paddling home to bask, mingle, upturn white bellies, scarred backs. What a gambit, then, to touch and be touched by the bulbous snout, vestigial trunk of this elephant's cousin, who slides beneath our canoe, back and forth, coming up for air and a view of us after each pass. The sun pours down like rain. We try all our lives to be human.