Melinda R. Smith

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There is depth and light and darkness in the sky this morning, it is a sky that in one portion of itself reveals an impersonal as well as my own personal past, it is a sky that permits one unencumbered passage, a historical sky in which many histories are revealed, including my own: Sag Harbor in the spring and the long flat-road scrubland drives I would take; Pennsylvania in the summertime, in those green woods I loved beyond all green woods— But I cannot go on naming these places I am given passage to through this eternal depth of light, this hole of light garlanded and carried forward, driven into memory, tapping memory, by darker closer clouds that curtain pure and formless achromatic light, clouds that are now dissolving into a less remarkable sky as the dawn gives way to morning, I cannot go on naming them because then I would be too swamped by memory to breathe, they are only brief passages we can bear, memory is too crushing.