Giraffe
“— GEORGE ELIOT Amina — A Somnambulist ST. JOHN’S EVE JUNE 23, 1973 THIS IS THE MARSH that lies at the end of the Svět, or world. It is larger and wilder and more real to me now in its winter coat. Reeds stand stiff upon it, silvered with frost. The water is thin transparent ice in which filaments of weed have been frozen, fair and glinting, like the hair of a rusalka rising from the boggy bottom. The willows stand golden on the island in the marsh, still with their slender leaves, still with ...their red ribbons. I pass under these willows now in my unlikely canoe, which is not Czechoslovakian but a type I have seen in picture books about American Indians: stretched like a drum skin and curved at both ends. I break the ice and set a paddle to the water and move past banks of soft earth on the island that are deep in snow, just as in summer they are hidden under thorns and poisonous weeds and darkened by clouds of mosquitoes, which swarm over the dogs set down each spring by men who cannot bring themselves to drown the dogs at birth, and instead let them out onto the island to starve or grow mad on a diet of water vermin.MoreLess
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