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symbol table
(for “someone traveling,” “sound of eating,” and, especially, “high in the sky” — of the Ojibwa, circa 1870) read the river for “high in the sky” not so long ago. hands left the chain to dissolve each winter. in the turning cash a boat wanders through silently, for one burning down a knot in the […]
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Film
In the film of the procession, the silhouettes carry mattocks and spades. They push wheelbarrows and broken bicycles. Some have lost limbs and swing by on crutches. There are carts loaded with furniture and a cart bearing a gallows. There are miners and men in trench coats, old women in long skirts, mothers with babes […]
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Dispatch (for Joe Donahue)
Thousands of feet of film are found in the archive. The editing is left to others. They eat the flowers, the ones on the plate and the ones in the garden. They eat the butterflies, and retell the story of the famous boxer and his entourage. In each retelling, the boxer is more heroic, and […]
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Intelligence
Muttering heard among the drinkers, whispered rumors down side streets and market stalls. Certain technologies forbidden, certain practices banned. The dock workers and stevedores. The chemists and armorers. The translators. Perhaps the entire clerical staff, including those few who can repair the pneumatic system. The shortages, to which correspondents have alluded, understood to be worsening, […]
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Surroundings
On sundown to sundown did it never sink in. There’s something missing on my mind – what’s it like? What’s it sound like? One ear hears what the other only chokes out: hints me there, hints me home.
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Zion
Crouched on the Ark, you Lord sit up late reading, inconsolable, Pushing open the paper scraps, you don’t get tired, teeth made to ink and Graphite, walled in, you are promised—inimical, swollen, feral, you Lord, pinned, Turn to the wall and pray, you turn to the Lord and pray, who can understand it, Outside, in […]
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Paperwhite
I consulted with myself about it Praying for and laboring after an awakening sense This ghost chose my head to do its thinking in A kind of arcadia where the painter puts light On the water perfectly despite the tremors Of the always filling never full sea Or salt and absence of the backward glance […]
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Phlebotomy
While she douses for a vein in your withering arm, you graze her hand and imagine you are Midas.
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from Dreamt
5. I was in the athletic club we’d been members of; (I had refused to keep it up). Room after room of empty Olympic-sized pools. Through a door that led to elevators I found you on the edge of a sleigh bed, in a white silk wrap. Snow was falling. The mattress was of packed […]