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Lily’s marking stock in the back where Walter sweeps and bets and makes boxes out of cardboard. Rose at the cash dreams Cracow. She’s got numbers on her arm. Eleanor threatens to call the union if my father calls her fat once more.           She’s fat. The code for thieves is nineteen; when Pauline shouts nineteen…

No resolution, understanding when she comes abrupt, final anger, rage at the painful displacement, the brutal use of rational love, the meagerness of the intentional offering.

It is not music, though one has tried music. It is not nature, though one has tried The rose, the bluebird, and the bear. It is not death, though one has often died. None of these things is there. In the everywhere that is nowhere Neither the inside nor the outside Neither east nor west…

I am driftwood on his beach, without an Uncle or a radio. I used to be a Spanish ship. Thinking of Seville, mahogany, he picks me up feeling both superior and sorry. *     *      * Or I am brave and he is smaller than the smallest thing he can remember. They had him sit for hours…

Once started nothing stops but for moment breath’s caught time stays patient.

Deep shade and the shades Of the great surround me. In the distance, the house Is a ghost over grass. You can see clear through it. This tree is standing still, Great names gnarling the bark Like the names of lovers. What were they but lovers Of this shadowing tree? Last evening at Kilkee The…

The constant X equals all variables: even strangers soon to be wonders just amount to X. Cistercians, all `sister’, in any case sexless, insist the last & best is left for X. So Wilde’s little swallow made children cry, don’t fly! But action is prayer for the poor and/or ill; just makes equal stone and…

Papa called her Pearl when he came home late, swaying as if the wind touched only him. Towards winter his skin paled, buckeye to ginger root, cold drawing the yellow out. The Cherokee in him, Mama said. Mama never changed: when the dog crawled under the stove and the back gate slammed, Mama hid the…

You plummeting shards of the darkness, You rising stars in the light still Fumbling for the rickety trellis Of morning, your suddenness fills The whole unsteady air with whirring Where we awaken quiet together, Breathing soundlessly, no least stirring While your wingbeats alter the weather Of daylight arriving beyond The window, quick-feathered rushing And calling…