Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp.

and spread like a plague.

silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape.

the mountains are going on and off like neon signs.

Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth...

I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood.

It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.

Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed.

hints of hulking

shadows, two pale splashes

round ripples...

a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China.

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

Today a gibbous moon marked the eastern sky like a smudge of chalk.

softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.

I have seen at sunset on a clear winter day houses, ordinary houses, whose bricks were coals and windows flame.

whirling, like smoke. They seemed to unravel as they flew,

Over my head I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff. Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.

It snowed. It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky, although the clouds looked so low and heavy they might drop all at once with a thud.