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POETRY INTRANSITIVE / ChristopherBuckley Evening is that old tune I never tire of especially when, as now, it is an adagio of rose and grey above the autumn trees and the turning leaves are nothing more than brown and dead across the lawns. When I was six or seven and climbed the eucalyptus, or the pines, I was in love, and wondering at the underlay of music and everything equally unattainable in the light— I gave in to longing then, and liked it. Doubtless, I have as much now as then— and there is nothing less in an on-shore breeze riffling the agapanthus and blue hibiscus, or in the little salt on the air lifting my lungs to breathe as simple as that old desire to float to where clouds turn red and dim, to where the past dies out of us, and sleeps. But this evening as I took the footpath back up the long hill to the house, I noticed the first few stars glide out overhead and sing, and they were in need of nothing more to complete their meaning. The Missouri Review · 9 WORK & DAYS / Christopher Buckley At Bonny Doon, Santa Cruz, California for Gary Young Mornings, spired shafts of sunlight waver, and you almost see a hovering of angels' wings above redwood and pine—angels who must have stood up straight inside my friend's thin frame and sang as he hoisted out the creekbed rock to rebuild a chimney and retaining wall, and all the rest he thinks he did solely on his own. Even water loses its breath over the little falls, ferns and blue hydrangeas drift in a primeval shade— when daylight does flood through, it is fundamental as our desire, and no matter how disaffected you are with God, it is clear then that time is something that keeps only in the loosening of our bones . . . And so our hands' slow work, this waste and sweetness of the days, of the heart's implicit praise, content to let the future find us as it will—in a garden pool, the carp shift brilliantly among their moss as we compare the lines of our faces, lines crossed in our palms, realizing there is no good luck, really, no bad. We could almost be older men, we drink our beers so quietly, breathing our lives out into thin clouds which gather on the cold and dusk—it is then we lean back on our benches or stand to catch the evening's final sift through the trees, like a last glimpse of angels' robes, slightly soiled with their care here. io · The Missouri Review ...

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