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These are connected to my version of America
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But the juice is elsewhere.
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This morning as I walked out of your room
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After breakfast crosshatched with
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Backward and forward glances, backward into light,
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Forward into unfamiliar light,
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Was it our doing, and was it
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The material, the lumber of life, or of lives
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We were measuring, counting?
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A mood soon to be forgotten
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In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow
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In this morning that has seized us again?
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I know that I braid too much on my own
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Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
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They are private and always will be.
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Where then are the private turns of event
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Destined to bloom later like golden chimes
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Released over a city from a highest tower?
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The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
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And you know instantly what I mean?
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What remote orchard reached by winding roads
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Hides them? Where are these roots?
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What we really are is hidden from you:
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girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots;
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tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby
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in the landfill; boy with the shy mouth playing his guitar
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at the picnic table, out in the dirt yard.
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We slide into this world benign and pliable,
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quills pressed down smooth over back and tail.
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Only one hour here stiffens the barbs into thousands
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of quick retorts. Everything this well-guarded
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remembers being soft once.
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I planted an apple tree in memory
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of my mother, who is not gone,
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the seeds remember everything they need
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to know to become yellow and transparent.
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The entrance at the back of the complex
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led onto a road, where an upended couch
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tilted into a ditch and a washing machine
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gleamed avocado beneath pine needles.
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From the end, you turned left and left again,
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then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac
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of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far
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as we dared before a man pushing a mower
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might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?"
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That was a question we could never answer.
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I loved the name of the place, White Hall,
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imagined that each interior was a stretch
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of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling
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photos of the family. Our own halls
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were brailled with nail holes of former
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tenants, the spackled rounds of fists.
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But doesn't longing clarify the body?
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The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing
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the World War II trenching tool;
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Danny, whose father, so much older
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than the other parents, died in his recliner
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one sunny afternoon while watching baseball;
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Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed
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into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing,
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waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys
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who, on those latch-key days, held themselves
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in narrow passages when no one
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was there to show them what to do.
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my father’s body is a map
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a record of his journey
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he carries a bullet
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lodged in his left thigh
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there is a hollow where it entered
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a protruding bump where it sleeps
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the doctors say it will never awaken
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as a child
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i wanted a scar just like my father’s
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bold and appalling a mushroom explosion
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that said i too was at war
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instead i settled for a grain of rice
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