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12 On Memorial Drive Watching the river, an orchestra playing a fugue, while I wait for my parking space to be legal, writing my poem, while a river of cars plunges by in tumbling waves and the placid water river beside it moves in little ripples like the slow movement on the radio now. Still on earth. The little balls on the sycamores (where the bark peels in piebald patterns) tremble, hanging on. Still here. The trees still reaching their nerve-endings across the blue sky with its orderly streams of boxcar-shaped clouds. Oh earthly stream in which I myself usually travel, but today I’m a living stone, a man in a parked car under the piebald trees, listening to the sighing of the tires, catching the silver skin of the river, its prickles of light, in the side-view mirror, shedding my business cares like a man turning up the volume of his music-thoughts to drown out the declarative and interrogative sentences of his prosy head, his heart sitting quietly in his chest, for once, his heart singing and breathing like a cello, oh to be irresponsible, but never lonely . . . 13 So turn up the music, as if in childhood, waiting for Mother to show up after school, waiting beneath the flaking sycamores, while cars with wrap-around windshields cruise by until I’m the last kid left, getting to know the maps of the tree trunks, to peel the pieces from the limbs, and study the bark with an empty brain, or split open the little balls with my thumb and shake into the wind the fuzz of a million seeds. ...

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