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| 48 The Second Miracle Waking, crawling, entering, assuming the horses are loose, suggesting, burrowing, rising to love the horizon that bends into the mountain, he dries himself in the sand, watching, recalling how he merged under the barbed wire, caught, returned, detained, caught again before the river fell in, swimming, gasping, involving, witnessing the deep sand figures come alive, twisted in sunken wire exposed to the currents, foaming in surprise, carrying him past the boundary, throwing him, flying him, forgetting him as he lies on the bank, afraid but not fearful, several bodies melting into the ground, shoes and shirts drying into tomorrow’s population evading the water to learn the alphabet of mud that drips out of their ears, his head mistaken for a fossil thrown up after too many drowned, his memory leaving marks, the dark thing following him, praying for him as it gets closer, his sudden rising as magnificent as the red stain of the sun leaving the sky, his feet sinking in his father’s mud, the old man’s arms and legs sticking out of the cotton field to warn him the house of his father is not the home of his son. ...

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