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46 Wartime Portrait, Dried Sunflowers Here’s the earth, stuck page. Here’s the garden with a nymph already stationed at the rack and screw. The whatever. So much for nature. Now clash sogs the dirt. You can feel it sponge at every step around your boots, feel it oozing up to trees, zig-zag, through the porch screen. There’s no thumbing edges, no separation. Drop the book or slam the door. Hardwood floors and house of photographs. . . . Out here . . . death with flower heads. Not that there’s no pain in the house of photographs, but it’s a family of pain, with other things mixed in, like love, responsibility. Still, we can’t get it right. And even if we could, grief would loom so awkwardly, stinking up the scene in every school play: see the kids so shock and stare? Lose a line, stammer? Some of them will be at it longer than the rest. Artists. Memory experts. Leaving for tomorrow everything except this blunt lurching, shadow, aftertaste: this underneath with no anticipation. They don’t know you put it from your mind as best you can. They don’t know, yet, the turn away, poor reason. They don’t know these hurts they have will open, will. Like seeds. ...

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