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I wait for my shadow to forget me, to take that one phantom step that I keep from taking. I wait for the simple flash of a dancer's spat upon this one moon of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval illuminated on the surface of some windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush in its constant audition of sawdust. Even this choreography of useless wishing is not enough to keep tonight from becoming nothing more than some floor's forgotten routine where faded, numbered dance-steps silently waltz themselves away. The orchestra's now ready to Fauré into the evening's last song while I try to convince myself to cross this room for the first time all night and rinse what's left in some débutante's silver sequined waterfall, hope keeling hopelessly ever closer to the edge. Across the floor other couples sashay on. A tin flask empties itself from asking, the shadow's last chance now wasted in some chandelier's dim lust.

My Uncle Fletcher, Our county seer, Bestowed his gifts On my no-good cousin Jeff, Who had a feeling About nearly everything. "That guy of hers . . ." "Those fucking queers . . ." He'd say, giving me the eye, Which was the same eye That could gaze upon A yellow froth of newborns, And know the cockerels From the pullets.

In a doorway Staring at rain Simple withstands Time on his hands

—Brook and road Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow step. The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent, at every turn, Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light— Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease over blanching yolks with an expertise honed from three decades of dawns at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine, where even the oldest in the old men's booth swore as if it were scripture truth they'd never had a breakfast better, rapping a glass sharply to get her attention when it went sorrowing so far into some simple thing— the jangly door or a crusted pan, the wall clock's black, hitchy hands— that she would startle, blink, then grin as if discovering them all again. Who remembers now when one died the space that he had occupied went unfilled for a day, then two, three, until she unceremoniously plunked plates down in the wrong places and stared their wronged faces back to banter she could hardly follow. Unmarried, childless, homely, "slow," she knew coffee cut with chamomile kept the grocer Paul's ulcer cool, yarrow in gravy eased the islands of lesions in Larry Borwick's hands, and when some nightlong nameless urgency sent him seeking human company Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese. She knew to nod at the litany of cities the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past, to laugh when the hunters asked if she'd pray for them or for the quail they went laughing off to kill, and then—envisioning one rising so fast it seemed the sun tugged at it—to do exactly that. Who remembers where they all sat: crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers, VF'ers muttering through their wars, night-shift roughnecks so caked in black it seemed they made their way back every morning from the dead. Who remembers one word they said? The Longhorn Diner's long torn down, the gin and feedlots gone, the town itself now nothing but a name at which some bored boy has taken aim, every letter light-pierced and partial. Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill, I picture you one dime-bright dawn grown even brighter now for being gone bustling amid the formica and chrome of that small house we both called home during the spring that was your last. All stories stop: once more you're lost in something I can merely see: steam spiriting out of black  coffee, the scorched pores of toast, a bowl of apple butter like edible soil, bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass, my plate's gleaming, teeming emptiness.

The front seats filled last. Laggards, buffoons, and kiss-ups falling in beside local politicos, the about to be honored, and the hard of hearing. No help from the middle, blenders and criminals. And the back rows: restless, intelligent, unable to commit. My place was always left-center, a little to the rear. The shy sat with me, fearful of discovery. Behind me the dead man’s illegitimate children and the bride’s and groom’s former lovers. There, when lights were lowered, hands plunged under skirts or deftly unzipped flies, and, lights up again, rose and pattered in applause. Ahead, the bored practiced impeccable signatures. But was it a movie or a singing? I remember the whole crowd uplifted, but not the event or the word that brought us together as one— One, I say now, when I had felt myself many, speaking and listening: that was the contradiction.

to Pete Foss, God give him good berth! Shipped deckhand June of ’fifty-one aboard the freighter Willis Kerrigan,

Where the snow effigies stood hard-packed and hosed to ice in front of the frat houses, in the middle of the little bridge over the stopped river, my leased car spun three times before the chainless tires caught. Each time round I saw a face: the man who imagined he loved me; the woman who confided in me, the child who cried "no" upon meeting me, as if he saw at once to what use we put those vanishing invented selves. The slurred tracks, ringed dark on the outbound path, froze and unfroze for weeks after the party to celebrate spring. Down the road, the local museum considered the Ice Age. The glacier slid in and out of its lit shape through a fan of color transparencies, each ray labelled with an age, a thaw, the gauged bed of the moraine. Showed how the ice junkheap hauled the broken shapes in which we live, cave and gully and flat. And a further dissolution, part of a shape we would not recognize for centuries,— like the coins that tumble down the dark slide to the weighted spar that triggers the mechanism that lifts the needle to the jukebox disk: "Blue Moon"— you saw it standing like an atomic field, charged with particles: little "you's" and "me's," estranged suddenly from the vanity of their motion— and the prefigured feel of it, music and moon, turning full force into its mindless will then stopping, my foot on the accelerator.

After Lucille Clifton Vulture, follow me up: here is the arm my mother held me aloft with (as well as she could, until she couldn’t), it is cut free of her body now, pulled away from her shoulder, away from her breath, as you, Vulture, point your wing toward her offered heart, toward me — let’s pound her fingers into paste, pound the hand open, come down, I chant, each word opens the sky, the clouds need to be warned — once she was hand & now she is wing, once she was dirt & now she is air, she was food & now she is bird, she was lifted & now she is gone.

The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside The battered road; and spreading far and wide Above the russet clods, the corn is seen Sprouting its spiry points of tender green, Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake, Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break. Opening their golden caskets to the sun, The buttercups make schoolboys eager run, To see who shall be first to pluck the prize— Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies, And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings, Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies, And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies, Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then That birds which flew so high would drop agen To nests upon the ground, which anything May come at to destroy. Had they the wing Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud, And build on nothing but a passing cloud! As free from danger as the heavens are free From pain and toil, there would they build and be, And sail about the world to scenes unheard Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird! So think they, while they listen to its song, And smile and fancy and so pass along; While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn, Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.