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 3 Before Autumn Late September, on the eve of autumn, the leaves of trees are like sirens canting, anxious for the blow which precedes Indian summer—relieving them of husks, unlike the crinkling of machines in the industrial village next door, air conditioners huffing through their final ode to summer. Technology is no stand-in for this: smoke before the screen phosphorescent in a darkened study, an entire shelf dedicated to King Lear—who never recovered in time—bearing his own corpse until the end, the stultifying frailty of human nature. The Goddess of Lake Michigan stands starkly over the horizon, content with the future, mechanism of sleet and wind: the logic of womanhood, that place of surprise and anxiety. Sky parrots brilliance from below, the sun perilously lost, light from houses—like dusk multiplying—toward fatally high integers across the land, their glow like dust before the human heart, protostars heating up to incandesce for as long as necessary. Interlocutor. Inquisitor. A mind of two halves, the heart interspersed throughout the body like a wandering mouth, He covers this land with the sheath of his body. He covets colors severely, seemingly no one to blame for his indiscretion. Where lies that bridge from “here” to “there”—that place where the two halves meet peaceably? I don’t want to know the great Sky God any more than through his standard swelling along the horizon, his standard bearer standing somewhere meekly I’m sure. Though I’ll never know from asking, these unbelievable characters appear cunning and— as yet—indiscernible. I simply wander through this wilderness set out for me, just speak to me! Though I command no army clouds march across the sky like militant women. The seas roil in all their discomfort, for winter, as if only for me. ...

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