Sunday, October 23, 1994
9. What are the consequences of silence?
Harbour. Fresh brown eggs. Curlicue anemones. The songs of
whales.
It is difficult to write about love.
Lapsang souchong tea. Smoked chilies. The maps of Utah and New
Mexico. Alfalfa bales. And then the cows. A hundred or more: Here-
ford, Limousine, Brahma. I stare into two hundred eyes at once. We
are traveling east, and inland, for the last, or first, time in our lives.
I am twenty-five years old.
He writes: I am thirty-two years old.
The tea tastes of bark, and wood-smoke.
You have not written one word about what happened between us.
(In a South African accent.)
The cows cross the river to give birth at the end of each winter. They
break the fence, and they swim. I will never eat beef again.