I thanked everyone. There was peanut butter enough (though we put it on chard), and a flowing river of dogs and acquaintances with humility enough and vast reserves of patience, enough to grow something fragile as compassion, from which justice is apparent and not the threat of a cage. I have been faulted for dwelling on parties, but there were sufficient ones in a crepe-paper chain we bound ourselves to, the only thing. And we took the marks and cuts welted to us and applied poultices and spoke them off and when we were becoming rid of them, we walked better, our senses came in and the oaks and pines climbed into our perceptions like names we had forgotten. And if ever the feeble old goblins we knew returned, we gradually learned to surround them and shoo them--watching croaking birds, we learned this. I thanked everyone for learning the old tricks and ruses that would set us at each others throats, how dumb that sounds and dancing around them like the greatest fighters knew how to. Kids go in baths. Potatoes come out of the ground. Forget shoes and talk to the things that melted into the land. There was no exodus. There was no escape. And when we found we had one choice, we learned we would never be alone. I thanked the ones who spurred us here. To the eye I was talking to nothing. I was talking to the ones woven in.
