No elegy is only for one quarter of the earth. I’ve known another country where the single man who spoke my language was named Mr. Sorrows and had come to be there by shipwreck. He explained to me why monkeys inhabit trees and fish, the sea, how birds got feathers to rise from water but kept their webbed feet, why we live in memory and, when we leave a place, wings spread wide, we might think, our old ways are still folded between our toes, into our deepest furrows. He told tales of origin while his land was held apart from him by an ocean, an element no human body was made to enter and from which we will not ascend.
Rose McLarney | Exotica Contents | Mudlark No. 51 (2013)