The Field

I notice, when the season for it comes around again, that the word we have for the evening is only a word for a crowd, celebrare, the verb the old language kept for the act of thronging, of pressing in great numbers toward a thing until the thing itself is lost behind the pressing, and I find I can no longer quite hear it as a word for joy, only as a word for how many of us there are, and how close, and how turned the same way.

A man a long time dead wrote to his wife that the day should be carried down the years with bonfires and bells and lights set burning from one shore of the continent to the other, and I think he meant the lights to stand for something handed back to the people who had paid for it in their own bodies, though I notice he did not write to her about the part of the field that would one day be roped, the white tents at the good end, the soft chairs already set out beneath them for the people who would arrive last and leave first.