The Adventure of a Poet

  Italo Calvino         

The little island had a high, rocky shoreline. On it grew the thick, low scrub, the vegetation that survives by the sea.  Gulls flew in the sky.  It was a small island near the coast, deserted, uncultivated: in half an hour you could circle it in a rowboat, or in a rubber dinghy like the one the approaching couple had, the man calmly paddling, the woman stretched out, taking the sun. As they came nearer, the man listened intently...

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