ENRAPTURED, 21 May 2011

It only lasted a few minutes, but sitting by the river as night came on it seemed that everything was right--the river's details swaddled in gold, the black stripes on a golden bumblebee, the river uncurling from light into dark, on its way across this grand old peninsula where--near what Daddy called Cedar Keys (plural)--it enters the Gulf. Perfect, the world is perfect, its light spilling upriver from the west, blasting cedar trunks into golden staves, woven and rewoven daily in the flights of its birds--small, black, white with yellow legs, the red-shouldered hawk--all stitching the invisible shirt of the world that holds me here, beneath the delicate call of the screech owl.