gnawing through a shinbone, a high howl inside of which a bloody, slashed-by-growls note is heard, unlike that sound, and instead, its opposite: a barely sounded sound (put your nuclear ears on for it, your giant hearing horn, its cornucopia mouth wide) -- a slippery whoosh of rain sliding down a mirror leaned against a windfallen tree stump, the sound a child's head makes falling against his mother's breast, or the sound, from a mile away, as the town undertaker lets Grammy's wrist slip from his grip and fall to the shiny table. And, if you turn your head just right and open all your ears, you might hear this finest sound, this lost sound: a plow's silvery prow cleaving the earth (your finger dragging through milk, a razor cutting silk) like a clipper ship cuts the sea. If you do hear this sound, then follow it with your ear and also your eye as it and the tractor that pulls it disappear over a hill until it is no sound at all, until it comes back over the hill again, again dragging its furrow, its ground-rhythm, its wide open throat, behind it.