Against Surrealism
I saw once in Vietnam along the side of a road a boy sleeping sprawled across the back of a water buffalo as big as a car a buffalo standing in a rice paddy and itself slumbering its head with up-curved horns swaying slowly and in the shade under it an egret holding in the tip of its beak a frog as green as the emerald shoots of rice planted by those women stooped over and up to their knees in mud the color of the buffalo on whose great wide shoulders the boy woke and turned to me a child's Buddha-like smile of inscrutable mystery
---Joseph Stroud
---found in Everything That Rises (2019)