Nebulous, diffuse. Lodged in that last sentence, a tiny hanging footbridge back to what I was telling you before. The definition of nebula: “any diffuse mass of interstellar dust, gas, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness.” Remember me sitting under the starry sky in the country blackness, waiting and listening for predators, feet frozen?

Every essay, every academic talk, every writing effort can be deepened through observation and detail, can be made evocative, can contain interstellar dust, luminous patches, and areas of darkness. There’s transcendence to be found in these connections—in the nebulous and nebulae, ducks and darkness—if we have the patience to wait for them.

So, now: the part of the talk that is about the ducks and Dennis Nurkse. I had dinner in December with Dennis—ducks, dinner, December, Dennis—and told him about my dilemma: that Annie Dillard’s weasel was going to kill my ducks because the ducks wouldn’t let me catch them and put them in the duck house.

“I could catch ducks,” he said.

I explained to him that no, they couldn’t be caught. The meat, the breasts, the fear of everything, the way they could scatter and run. Being Dennis, he listened thoughtfully, considering all the angles.

“Yeah, I could catch them,” he said.

If a poet could catch them, I said to myself, why can’t a prose writer? I may not do it as succinctly, but I don’t need to. I have all of break, the part, anyway, in which I wasn’t sitting on the sled.

So I did what a writer does—I imagined my way into the mind of a sitting duck. Because misery so often comes down on them from above, ducks are sensitive to looming shadows, the falling ax, the diving hawk, and though these ducks can’t fly away from ground predators, they know to flap their big wings as they run, removing much of what there is to grab and flustering me in the confusion. I had to become invisible to them in order to get close enough to the duck-house door to jump up and slam it when one of them slowly and warily picked its way inside to the bowl of cracked corn. It took a whole day of sitting motionless in a lawn chair in the snow and the big down coat to trap seven of them and push them through the tiny back door into an enclosure. The last one—a small female with a green-black body and a delicate, dotted-Swiss head—simply wouldn’t be tricked. She was bonded to the first one caught and instead of venturing in and out of the duck house had spent the day standing or lying on the grass next to the enclosure as close to her friend as possible. All that separated them was the wire and the fact that one would eat and the other would be eaten.