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of all, how there is no word
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for so much splendor.
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This, too, is a source
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of consolation. Between you and memory
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everything is water. Names of the dead,
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or saints, or history.
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There is a realm in which
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—no, forget it,
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it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
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A man drives a stake
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through his own heart
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and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia
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begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
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and the leaves take over
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and again he has learned
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to let go.
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If there is a god, let it be the hyena
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who plunges her mouth into the river after eating
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our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who,
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dark with thirst, poisons the river
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unbeknownst to both of them.
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Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called
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already through “time” out of our houses. She tells
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her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth
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with what is sharp. She asks, Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace?
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Yes, we will add this story. We ask her,Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songsabout hunger & thirst & fur? & she, being wiser than we,
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says, Yes, I will sing them ifyou grant me your permissionto turn them into poems abouta mercy.
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Please raise your hand,
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whomever else of you
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has been a child,
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lost, in a market
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or a mall, without
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knowing it at first, following
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a stranger, accidentally
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thinking he is yours,
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your family or parent, even
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grabbing for his hands,
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even calling the word
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you said then for “Father,”
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only to see the face
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look strangely down, utterly
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foreign, utterly not the one
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who loves you, you
|
who are a bird suddenly
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stunned by the glass partitions
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of rooms.
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How far
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the world you knew, & tall,
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& filled, finally, with strangers.
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after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden
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The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing
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only things ordinary
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as water & light.
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I adore you: you’re a harrowing event.
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I like you very ugly, condensed to one
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deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest
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question, your hold is all clutch and sinker.
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Cannibal old me,
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with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides
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with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver.
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How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you,
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the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today.
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Curiouser and curiouser,
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your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body
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is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle
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in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes.
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In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry.
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You put on my heat,
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(that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping
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hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly,
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hungering down the valley, no one question to cover
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all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use.
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You’re wrong and right
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at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring
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chopping down the back door. You slap my attention
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all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime?
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Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.
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Taking on an aspect of the Orient,
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Skies full of hatchets and oranges
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Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood:
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But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor?
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Skies full of hatchets and oranges
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Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh—
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But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor,
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As the nights grow steadily into mountains.
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