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over a decade of loss, and I don’t know what’s left to say. If we are given love only to have it taken away, what solace can anyone o¤er but your voice be present among the shifting chairs, the embarrassed noises of absence. The wait is always too long. Sonnet on the Location of Hell Jack Agüeros april 1996 You worry about hell: Where it is and what it looks Like; how far you should go to safely peek at it; What to do to avoid it; how to get others out of there. Haven’t you seen the sudden dumping of human beings On all the streets and tunnels of our city? Don’t they Look like Jesus freshly deposed, twisted and limp like Licorice in the lap and arms of His Holy Mother Mary? Jesus was dead only momentarily, as these men and Women are, but there are no holy arms eyes or mothers To cry and cradle these dead until their resurrection. We have made this grotesque Hell on Earth and burn the Helpless with the silent Xame of rust. Worriers listen: Neither God nor rabbit’s feet can stamp these Wres out For Hell is our holy arms folded, our holy voice silent. Storm C. K. Williams september 1996 Another burst of the interminable, intermittently torrential dark afternoon downpour, and the dozens of tirelessly garrulous courtyard sparrows stop hectoring each other and rush to park under a length of cornice endearingly soiled with decades of wing-grease. 218 part 11 parading poetry The worst summer in memory, thermal inversion, smog, swelter, intimations of global warming; though the plane trees still thrust forth buds as though innocent April were just blooming, last week’s tentative pre-green leaXings are already woefully charred with heat and pollution. Thunder far o¤, benign, then closer, slashes of lightning, a massive, concussive unscrolling, an answering tremor in the breast, the exaltation at sharing a planet with this, then sorrow, that we really might strip it of all but the bare wounded rock lumbering down its rote rail. A denser veil of clouds now, another darkening downlash, the wind rises, the sparrows scatter, the leaves quake, and Oh, I throw myself this way, the trees say, then that way, I tremble, I moan, and still you don’t understand the absence I’ll be in the void of unredeemable time. Twelve suns, the prophecies promise, twelve vast suns of puriWcation will mount the horizon, to scorch, sear, burn away, then twelve cosmic cycles of rain: no tree left, no birdsong, only the vigilant, acid waves, vindictively scouring themselves again and again on no shore. Imagine then the emergence: Oh, this way, the sky streaked, Oh, that way, with miraculous brightness; imagine us, beginning again, timid and tender, with a million years more this time to evolve, an epoch more on all fours, stricken with shame and repentance, before we Wre our forges. Williams / Storm 219 ...

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