The clouded afternoon is mellowed to windsoftened edges, children kneeling beside the water with fishing lines, two birds in a chase across the canal soaring down and up in a loop into the suspended storm of a green treetop, where they sit and begin to sing. With distance the light gathers a slow ecru haze, girls’ flesh no longer bleached by the zenith sun now in gentler light reawakening to warmer colors, faint shadows of thigh-muscles, stretched filaments of skin cells saying touch . . . stay. . . . Slothrop walks on—past eyes opening, smiles breaking like kind dawns.
