I’ve walked to a hill mile from the house. It’s not really a hill but a mountain slope that heaves up, turns sideways, and comes down again, straight down to a foot-wide creak. Every-thing I can see from here used to be a flatland covered with shallow water. .°Used to be.±means several hundred millions years ago, and the land itself was not really .°here.±at all, but part of a continent floating near Bermuda. On the top is fin of rock, a marine deposition created during Jurassic times by small waves moving in and out slapping the shore.
I’ve come here for peace and quiet and to see what’s going on in this secluded valley, away from ranch work and sorting corrals, but what I get is a slap on the ass by a prehistoric wave, gains and losses in altitude and aridity, outcrops of mud composed of rotting volcanic ash that fell continuously for ten thousand years a hundred million years ago. The soils are a geologic flag – red, white, green, and gray. On one side of the hill, mountain mahogany gives off a scent like orange blossoms; on the other, colonies of sagebrush root wide in ground the color of Spanish roof tiles. And it still looks like the ocean to me. .°How much truth can a man stand, sitting by the ocean, all that perpetual motion,.±Mose Allison, the jazz singer, sings.

湖南名校试卷

The wind picks up and blusters. Its fat underbelly scrapes the uneven ground, twisting like taffy toward me, slips up over the mountain, and showers out across the Great Plains. The sea smell it carried all the way from Seattle has long since been absorbed by pink grass – the rotting granite that spills down the slopes of the Rockies. Somewhere over the Midwest the wind slows, tangling in the hair of hardwood forests, and finally drops into the corridors of the cities, pas Manhattan’s World Trade Center, ripping free again as it crosses the Atlantic’s green swell.
Spring jitterbugs inside me. Spring is wind, symphonic and billowing. A dark cloud pops like a blood blister over me, letting hail down. It comes on a piece of wind that seems to have widened the sky, comes so the birds have something to fly on.
(from Spring by Geetel Ehrlich)
heave 起伏，隆起fin 鳍，鳍状物deposition 沉淀，沉积secluded 孤寂的，与世隔绝的altitude 高度，海拔mahogany 花梨木sagebrush 北美艾灌丛perpetual 永恒的，不变的buster 呼啸狂欢underbelly 下腹部scrape 刮擦，掠过，拂过taffy 太妃糖tangle 纠结，缠绕jitterbug 使激动不安，紧张billowing 翻腾的，汹涌的blister 水疱August 高考试卷

湖南名校试卷

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