This morning, this gray and dripping morning, I walked in a neighbor’s corn field, thick-grown with silage for his cows. Except for the soft sighing in the tops of the trees in my woods behind me, the silence was deep and cyclical, like a tide, like a black spot in space between two stars. I stood in the chest-high corn plants and listened, and heard nothing but breeze, and I listened again, and inexplicably, a song came into my head, a song I have neither heard nor thought of in years. I walked on through the corn and then at the perimeter found some bear scat. A calf watched me…