Tuesday
Aug022016
Tuesday, August 2, 2016 at 11:44AM
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T h i s D a r k L i g h t
From the Pool
Columbia, South Carolina
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The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air -- the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go) -- the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color'd dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time, (are they not showing off their amusement?) -- the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes -- occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by -- the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade -- the quawk of some pond duck -- (the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;) -- then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek -- (what was the yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch'd legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?) -- the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue -- and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel" -- the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading, expanding -- a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum -- yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything -- who knows?
= Walt Whitman =
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Happy Tuesday
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