“If you were silent Flight of herons on dark sky...Oh! Autumn snowflakes!”

“The woods hung dark on the hills; above, the sky violet, specked with minute feathery clouds, white as snowflakes.”

“The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.”

“Oh gods, are you listening? A storm out at sea is one of your greatest creations. You should hear it praised. The sky is dark, almost as night, and the swells... they were taller than mountains.”

“Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.”

“I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one’s own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.”