Bob Dylan: High water

She was 12 when she decided that her father was the car. When you get close enough to something for long enough, you build a vocabulary. You start to redevelop inside of the object. She saw it in his dry features, in the accidents of a face. His exchanges with the car occurred in the high frequencies.

On weekends he could not drive because it would rain and he could not drive in the rain. On those days he would rub his wrist for hours, as if trying to conduct a feeling that he had misplaced.

She was 13 when she decided a similar thing of her mother. You could not count all of the birds in her walk. There were at least twenty. She only ever said one thing and it was a question. “How do you recover from seeing a terrible thing in the sky.” Birds seemed to have a small, closed language.

She, herself, was the garden that year. The strawberries grew and grew then but that did not stop them from being members of the ground.

When she was 16 she trapped a fly against the window screen. The little fly fought and fought until it slowed and fell, in the vocabulary of a balloon, or the snow in a globe. It didn’t snow there but she recognized something in the basic vibration and decline—the small, visible chemical exchanges between a complete system of breathing and a vacuum. Through the window she could see the hillside, flowers growing there. She needed to see a terror that wasn’t small.