Zeroing In

"I am a landscape," he said."a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.

There are daunting cliffs there,

And plains glad in their wayof brown monotony.  But especiallythere are sinkholes, placesof sudden terror, of small circumferenceand malevolent depths.""I know," she said. "When I set forthto walk in myself, as it might beon a fine afternoon, forgetting,sooner or later I come to where sedge and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,mark the bogland, and I knowthere are quagmires there that can pull youdown, and sink you in bubbling mud.""We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy,a good dog, friendly.  But there was an injured spoton his head, if you happened just to touch it he'd jump up yelpingand bite you.  He bit a young child,they had to take him down to the vet's and destroy him.""No one knows where it is," she said,"and even by accident no one touches it.

It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my waypreoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,sleeping on green moss of my own woods,

I myself without warning touch it,and leap up at myself -""- or flinch backjust in time."                    "Yes, we learn that.

It's not a terror, it's pain we're talking about:those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,that are bruised forever, that timenever assuages, never."