Penguin Random House, Belletristik, The Nightfields (Englisch, Joanna Klink, 2020)

THE INFINITIES I don't know when it began, the will to sort moment from moment, to hold on by saying I can't care about the red maple stripped of color, I choose the rain disappearing at my feet. I choose this friend to love, the deep blacks of summer. Abandon the rest. I am unable to picture anything so whole it doesn't crush what's missing. Is it my body across many seasons turning already a little to bone, or the slow stars precisely set in depths so vast the sky is just a dome within falling domes. How is the snowfield scattered with dry leaves already a pavillion of twilight. And my arms just a motion in the great soundlessness of sky. I have traded childhood exuberance for for fragile acts. I will slip into corner tables just to watch people speak. I love the way they lean into each other or stretch back with the bluespun languor of an evening, lights strung up on the wood ceiling to mimic the lift of stars. There are no empty hopes. But knowing what to hope for is steady work. What was ever so important to you you left your daily life to heed it? I don't even know what breathes in the dark hills outside this town. Some mornings the roads almost float, the weeds in the fields wiry fistfuls of sun. What were you looking out for? What did you dismiss along the way. Because we live we are granted names, streams, shocks of heat, murmuring summers. All the days you have ever breathed are swallows shooting between trees. When the wind pushes branches in and out of shade it is an opening, as every small gesture toward another person is incomprehensibly alive. Will you be part of the stoneless passage? When life starts to take things away will you grow very still beneath the larch or feel the slow flight of birds across your body. The bright key of morning. The bay fanned with foam.