What Cannot Be Held

"He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur.  He touched the cold and perfect teeth.  The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.  Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from.  Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel.  He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.  What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war.  What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can.  But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Flowery Benedictions

"The path the old man took was a fire trail that had been built by the C C C.  From the glade in which he now made his home he had to climb nearly a thousand feet to reach it, but once on the trail the walking was easy and excepting the injured shoe he would have swung along at a good pace.  It was six miles to the river where he crossed and came to the highway and the same ubiquitous crossroads store with the drunken porch, the huge and rock-battered Nehi signs, the weather-curled laths, the paintless stonecolored wood--but the old man had taken an early start.  Through the gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain's shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the vally--and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns--the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.

Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks and stop where a snake lies curled belly-up to the silent fold and dip of a petal-burst of butterflies fanning his flat and deadwhite underside.  Scout smells cautiously at the snake, the butterflies in slow riot over his head, flowery benedictions of their veined and harlequin wings.  With his cane the old man turns the snake, remarking the dusty carpet pattern of its dull skin, the black clot of blood where the rattles have been cut away.

They go on--steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing--coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley."

Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Wisconsin, Summer 2012