| desert, blows through the sage, snaps the tumbleweed off at its fragile axil stem to send it rolling in the current. The horn blares across the desert across to the sharp Tetons. The ruminating elk pause, the twitching voles. What is coming on the wind? What does the brazen clarion foretell? Caught in the scarps and canyons of the Tetons, the horn rebounds and amplifies itself, shattering the last ice-sheathed aspen in the deepest sunless dells and then roars starward. |
| "But that's not bad eithershorn against my ruin. When you think about it. The sharp-edged fragments cutting down, scrapping away. Severing. Yes. Not bad at all. The two-edged sword. The two-edged engine standing by the door. 'But that two-handed engine at the door/Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.' Not bad, not bad. 'Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes.'" |
| He says this to me, pointing out the window at the scruffled, slowly expanding landscape, bleaked by recent winter, but turning up, greening softly, yellow first. |
| "Look at the 'rath primrose that foresaken dies,/The tufted crow-toe, and the pale jessamine,/The white pink, the pansy freaked with jet,/The glowing violet.' Ah, 'Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,/And the daffadillies fill their cups with tears.' Ah, the daffadillies, the daffodils, 'that come before the swallows dare/And take the winds of March with beauty.' Yes, the daffodils. Clara's favorite flower. These fragments have we shorn against our ruin." |
| The Tetons are almost wholly dark now against the amaranthus sky. The elk will be huddled upon themselves into a tightened knot for warmth. A small steamy mist will rise over them as the mountain cold comes on |
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