North Woods

by Daniel Mason

Only God knows who has a true heart,

As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more,

How did this come to pass? Might I locate, in my passage through the world, the spark that struck the kindling of the fancy of my soul? Was there, on those back rivers of the St. Lawrence, some watery Road to Damascus?

But God had noticed me. Or simply, pressing His brush to the unfolding scene of battle, He bent the fabric of His canvas, and saved my life.

Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness.

To mourn a lost friend, however, is not the same as wishing for another.

Too often I have sensed, in the hungry gaze of the Albany widow or the lonely farmer’s wife, a plan to tame me. But

And fights were rare; they knew the contours of each other’s grievances too well to expect any kind of resolution.

He told them his story, half of which clearly was fiction; the challenge, they realized, was to recognize which half.

“Because you are you, and she is she,” he said.

Not to his neighbors, for he has a right to be remembered as the person he pretended.

Pasture gave way to bramble, bramble to brush, and brush to birch and pine,

asks if can I hear it, the murmurs, the screaming, accuses me of deafness, says sound—all words, all winds, all birdsong—does not disappear but remains about us.

it provoked a heated discussion among the Benevolents about

justice that left Professor Trumbull in a state of almost orgasmic pedagogical bliss.

That death meant not only

the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance.

Sound and fury, she thought, signifying nothing. Or signifying something, but something lost.

In the months after she died, he’d woken every morning certain that she was lying by him in his bed.

She’d known the word “depression,” certainly, but had always pictured it a bit like a sad but sweet and slightly silly Eeyore, whereas the dark winter cloud that came upon her sucked the very air from life.

It was as if she had been made aware of a structure to the world, an architecture which existed beyond her and which her sadness could not consume.

She felt as if she had fallen in love with someone only to learn that they were dying.

has found that the only way to understand the world as

something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.