Heron

The great blue - graceful and ungainly all at once - like a young girl just before she discovers she is beautiful. She crosses the marsh (the willowy grasses, silver-green, brushed back by the evening breeze), coasts over open water (her reflection feeling its way between the wavery spears of pine, the inverted cottage roofs). She saunters down the wind, dreamy and deliberate (a calligraphy brush, surging, confident in its intent), and finally comes to rest - not in the proffered bough of the silver birch, not on the jade-green hillock on the pond's east bank - but there, on the wooden gutter of `Mooney Fuel and Grain,' chipped and faded from the long winter. A New England stillness. The cameras do not click, the painters do not paint.