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GALAXIES

Coming up the mountain road tonight, I was pondering something I forgot all about the instant I saw below me a thin slice of moon and the silver spark of venus in still water among emerging stars. It was a freshly irrigated paddy, decorated with our galaxy. As I walked on into the realization, raising my head to behold real moon and real venus in a sky still blue at the western edge, a flock of ducks whirred from a paddy higher up and flew off invisible against the deep dark of the lower mountains, my ears following them as I stopped moving to listen and watch until they flew out from before the darkness of the mountains and arced through the lighter sky, wing blurs wedging off now toward just a whisper of a lake, some wild part of me flying with them

Past every paddy up the mountain, frog roar increases to crescendo at my door