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380 Darwin’s Eyes derek sheffield He kept seeing himself, a swallow peeking from its nest, moss, the crawl of a wasp across his study window. And he kept having to drop everything and duck as certain callers appeared in the mirror he’d aimed at the front door. A beak he could understand. A talon was a hand holding his own. It was the eye, with its vicious complexity, that stabbed at him— lightning bolts of doubt, a cyclopean stare, ten years his Origin stewing in a stack of notes. And the eye, perhaps, why he went back, after all was said and begun, to the worms, spending his last years watching them as he played piano, feet pumping and fingers wriggling over the black and white keys, noting the effects of concerto and dirge. His first passion, his last, those tender needles with their dark impulse to feel all around them our earth. ...

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