How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

by Barbara Kingsolver

How to Be Married Think of rain: the gathering sheer fall on a quaking plain. Like a kiss, the long slake. Here we stand in blissful drench. It only falls; no calling it back from here. River infinite, grinding belly on bedrock, paring the plain to a canyon, changing the shape of the world. Love is no granite boulder, praised for its size. It’s the water that parts around it, moving mountains. Nothing new, a marriage. This union is as old as it gets: ocean floor, the wave and shore that can’t be still and can’t come apart. Think of blue-gray horizons, heavy-lidded. Don’t rule out surprising possibilities. An ocean can rise up whole into the firmament, given eternity. No going back from today. Water flows downhill and still we are here, new as naked children standing in the cool precipitous fall: think of rain.

As people do, we’ve come looking for proof that the dead of the past were just like us. And grow quiet, having found it.

How patience is a promise a seed makes to its ground, from the day of cracking and rooting in, clinging to this escarpment since before the trial of Socrates, before the tilting up of plinths at Stonehenge.