“Old Woman With a Goiter”

Just as in a field a herd of cows will lean and clang their copper cauldrons like the rain, with dawn breaking pink upon their bangles, and stand there blotched, humbled and hindered by their own sound, and crumple their knees, dumbstruck, while every jerk of their backs and involuntary gesture registers the ringing of a bell, so this old woman stood behind a mountain spruce, struck by something in the field, a row of phlox or patch of bluebell, holding her spray of yellow gentians, while that great ball shifted on her neck, ripe as a stitch of loganberry.