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59 In the Skin Tent the Heart Was a Fire We saw yours across the fields, its speech a scarf of smoke. In the center of my life, I woke flat on the bed, settling like a stone in my body. My mother was in the next room, drying her hairdo, wearing blue. Soon she would draw the water for my daughter’s bath. How had I grown so old so young, surrounded by books, mouthing poems over the face in the long mirror, my bottom-half stippled with my daughter’s drumming fingerprints, so my legs and feet blurred into earth, into a prairie stirred by the hooves? White crack of apple on the board. Smell of chrysanthemums, my mother’s hands, and an old knowing, wool-stiff and wordless, braiding through us, through the rooms. ...

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