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42 Sloth If I write a villanelle today, it’s got to lift the leaves and find its own sad rhymes. It’s raining out. It’s cold. I’m not about to poke around in this bare plot, hoping I might spoon up a bleached-out bone, some Saxon thing the villanelle forgot. Plenty of rhymes—shot, jot, apricot. My part is listening for a certain tone underneath the iambs’ teeter-tot. No one pays me to stir this formal pot and other things are waiting to be done. But the villanelle recalls what I forgot, that words are watching for a six-winged thought, newly hatched, airborn, not a clone. It could be hovering right above this spot, an insect with translucent wings, a knot of overlapping lines, patterns known to merge with night like oil of bergamot. Yes, villanelle, that’s what I forgot. ...

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