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Ontological
- The University Press of Kentucky
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24 LISTEN HERE ONTOLOGICAL from Windfall: New and Selected Poems (2000) This is going to cost you. Ifyou really want to hear a country fiddle, you have to listen hard, high up in its twang and needle. You can't be running off like this, all knotted up with yearning, following some train whistle, can't hang onto anything that way. When you're looking for what's lost everything's a sign, but you have to stay right up next to the drawl and pull of the thing you thought you wanted, had to have it, could not live without it. Honey, you will lose your beauty and your handsome sweetie, this whine, this agitation, the one you sent for with your leather boots and your guitar. The lonesome snag of barbed wire you have wrapped around your heart is cash money, honey, you will have to pay. Poet's note: "Ontological" adapts the phrase ': . . when you go lookingfor what is lost, everything is a sign"from Eudora Wel~'s story "The Wide Net." ...