Night Soul and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

deep-rooted sadness.
    I know what he means, but…
     
     
    Employment: that’s number one right now…
    What is my job? The future. Helping this boy…
     
     
    “I know who you are,” Ali said, standing at such a distance that I stopped trying to close it, his uncle bleeding at his feet, arms fallen apart, his mother joining Ali distraught and then seeing me, seeing me retreat.
     
     
    …a poet who died in prison: to be scattered through this history.
     
     
    To go from thing to thing unafraid, that’s all: knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and interrupting or may come round again.
     
     
    …pasturing your life…
     
     
    New nomad waiting for it to come to me…
     
     
    For nomad is the movement of others from me as if it made little difference who was the mover.
     
     
    I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.
     
     
    Close, she said. She and I, she meant. She said Ali would speak without raising his hand—like you, my wife said. Has it come to that?—and once she failed to recognize him when he did raise his hand. She understood that I missed him.
     
     
    He knows Ska, she informs me fondly.
     
     
    Nomaderie nowadays. Did she get that from me? You could get into a state about it. You didn’t need to go anywhere anymore: it came to you , though nomaderie…A writer pausing at a village in Crete: “total absence of anything approaching a communal existence. We have become spiritual nomads; whatever pertains to the soul is derelict, tossed about by the winds like…”
     
     
    A woman to whom I confessed comes back for more, having half-heard. For nomad is the movement of others from you as if it made little difference, if I could ever tell Ali this, who’s gone now.
    Salat, five-times-a-day prayer.
     
     
    We serviced the sites on a seasonal basis until the seasons began to come to us which would have made the job easier but the seasons changed in nature, pushing out from within: we were on the move but much more regular than our friends who stayed put; and the sites were everything you would have expected of a site, manned, unmanned.
     
     
    Time we break into seasons briefer and briefer now like space where we are restless and think ourselves on the move. Until, having pulled the seasons along with us we turn to one long season its length no longer long or relative, no longer even length.
     
     
    Seasons don’t wait for us but come along in us now and also speed away from us. I try, clocking in on my own (timeless, I hoped) job, to build on others’ work, John Clare’s “I Am”—“the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; / Even the dearest, that I love the best, / Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.”
     
     
    The nomad state: nomad nation.
     
     
    Nomaderie, the form of “pieces.”
     
     
    I believe the boy was in the end blamed for telling about his shepherd cousin.
     
     
    I recalled my lost father largely self-taught reciting Emily Dickinson years before I knew who that was and as if she—for me now a foundling spirit, Founding Mother—were a card-carrying Christian: my father, a job printer on Vanderbilt Avenue near Grand Central, urging me to close the Arabian Nights, a tale of two unexpectedly linked dreams, as it happened, and open a book of fact, yet speaking to me as I to Ali like an equal.
     
     
    Your God as a nomad.
     
     
    I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.
     
     
    A woman who knows what to overlook yet seems to have overlooked nothing, was my thought about my wife, her map of world foods she discussed with her children.
     
     
    I thought I would move on. And the boy. Abbod’s photos of the Bridge may as well have been the American dream left in New York when he slipped back over the border into the Notre Dame mountains by canoe, the long, eastward slanting lac a minute flattened ellipse in uncle’s atlas. “Abbod,” the mother said. “Abbod.” Strapping specimen