NEA Big Read at PWPL

  Joy to the World by: Martin Achatz Joy is elusive. I have a poet friend who’s been chasing it for years.    Hers is an albino whitetail that haunts the woods and cemeteries and trails around our town on the shores of an arctic inland sea.    Ever since she moved here, she’s longed for a close encounter with this scrap of winter, its marble haunches and swan neck.    I often wonder if, when she sees it, she will burst into blossom, shudder into glory like a peacock.   Another friend, a physicist, searches the heavens for joy, magnifies with binoculars and telescope the shadows of lunar craters, blurs of comet tails, flashes of Geminids flinting through December stars.    When he finds it, will he blaze like an aurora, an emerald waterfall at the birth of night? Still another friend listens for joy in the green cantatas of birds, The whistle of Black-capped Chickadees, rubber-ducky squeaks of nuthatches,  weirdo-weirdo-weirdo  ...