Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

of towers made of glass and bridges between stars.

He looks like the souls of ten thousand trees distilled into a single form.

What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?

it was so cold that when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.

I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish,

This is how it feels every night as he tries to sleep, his thoughts ranging across mountains and oceans, weaving through stars, his brain a lantern inside his skull, blazing.

that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”