JOSEPH McELROY
71
have to make up, to contain those projectiles in the settled Novem–
ber light of late afternoon in the Bois when I begin my run.
Which man? The man with a bag full of boomerangs, wooden
boomerangs one by one, old and nicked and scraped and shaped
smooth to the uses of their flight, one or two taped like the business
end of a hockey stick. When I arrived, coming down the dirt path to–
ward a great open green, and broke into my jog, he was there. And
he was there when I wound my way back three or four miles later, in
later light, around me the old cognates of trees, of dusk, of leaves
crackling under foot. Yet, veering down hedged paths, past thickets
where dogs appear, and piney spaces with signs that say WALK, to
surprise a parked car where no car can drive, and across the large,
turned-over earth of bridle paths, and around an unexpected chilly
pond they call a sea, a lake, that has hidden away for this year its
water lilies, I could sometimes lose myself with the deliberateness of
the pilgrim runner whose destination is unknown
and
known pre–
cisely as his sanctuary is the act of running itself. So I find I am
beside the children's zoo, or so close to some mute lawn girdled by
traffic thinking its way home that I can plot my peripheral position
sensing I am near both the Russian Embassy and the Counterfeit
Museum. Or I can't see Eiffel's highly original wind-stressed "tree"
anywhere, whereas here's a racecourse again on my right, though
this isn't the other racecourse that I know, so now I must be running
in the other direction toward Boulevard Anatole France and the soc–
cer stadium. But I am still meditating the famed water jumps of the
other racecourse, and turning back in search of the Porte d'Auteil
Metro, I breathe the smoke of small fires men and boys feed near the
great beech trees.
But most often, I ended where the boomerang-thrower was
working his way into the declining light. And passed him, because
that was my way back to the Metro. He began low, he aimed each of
those bonelike, L shaped, end-over-end handles along some plane of
air as if with his exacting eyes he must pass it under a very low
bridge out there before it could swoop upward and slice around and
back, a tilted loop whose moving point he kept before him pivoting
his body with grim wonder and familiarity. As I came near, I would
not stop running but I might turn my head, my shoulders, my torso,
to try to follow the flight of the boomerang. More than once I felt it
behind me, palely revolving, silent as a glider and beyond needing
light to cross the private sky of the Bois, which for all its clarity of
slope and logical forest is its own shadow and contagion within a me-
