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Know if they are lonely. The poachers drift with an almost frightening Care under the bridge. Water is a luminous Mirror of swallows' nests. The stars Have gone down. What does my anguish Matter? Something The color Of a puma has plunged through this net, and is gone. This is the firmest Net I ever saw, and yet something Is gone lonely Into the headwaters of the Minnesota. CONFESSION TO J. EDGAR HOOVER Hiding in the church of an abandoned stone, A Negro soldier Is flipping the pages of the Articles of War, That he can't read. Our father, Last evening I devoured the wing Of a cloud. And, in the city, I sneaked down To pray with a sick tree. I labor to die, father, I ride the great stones, I hide under stars and maples, And yet I cannot find my own face. In the mountains of blast furnaces, The trees turn their backs on me. Father, the dark moths Crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting. SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER 163 And I am afraid of my own prayers. Father, forgive me. I did not know what I was doing. TO THE POETS IN NEW YORK You strolled in the open, leisurely and alone, Daydreaming of a beautiful human body That had undressed quietly and slipped into the river And become the river: The proud body of an animal that would transform The snaggled gears and the pulleys Into a plant that grows under water. You went searching gently for the father of your own agony, The camellia of your death, The voice that would call out to you clearly and name the fires Of your hidden equator. Solitary, Patient for the last voices of the dusk to die down, and the dusk To die down, listener waiting for courteous rivers To rise and be known, You kept a dark counsel. It is not seemly a man should rend open by day The huge roots of his blood trees. A man ought to hide sometimes on the banks Of the sky, And some human beings Have need of lingering back in the fastidious half-light Even at dawn. THE RIVER DOWN HOME Under the enormous pier-shadow, Hobie Johnson drowned in a suckhole. I cannot even remember His obliterated face. Outside my window, now, Minneapolis 164 ...

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