Nathaniel Bellows reads
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An egret lifting its blue feet in the reeds, among the cut-up sticks floating in the shallows of the lake. What caught my eye was its color—beyond white, white moving past itself into something lit, as if with winter’s last light. That water was gray— I should say that the water was black, because, against it, the bird glowed, plumage like an over-powdered pastry. There were flowers, too. And green buds on the trees, like flecks of food scattered on a sleeve. Otherwise, there was little hue to report. You should have seen that bird—not its coat but the way it moved reminded me of the blind, how they pause before they walk, calibrating their movements like a clock. Once, when my watch had stopped, I opened its face and peered at its frozen parts and felt as I did peering through the reeds at the bird: disbelief combined with fatigue: the list of misunderstood things extends: the bird, the watch, the blind…where are you among them? The bird plodded through some floating trash, at which point I left not to have to see it struggle with the bright wrappers. I don’t know what happened after that—where the bird stepped, or, if its beak pierced the black lake, or if, when it flew away, it was absorbed by the sky… I wondered what you’d say about all this. Maybe you’d suggest it was the crocuses, actually, hundreds of pale shells, each with a tiny votive flame that gave the day its brightness.