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We Are Gentlemen Abroad My French partner's passport's Dutch, I'm native to New Orleans to escape Napoleon's levies, to which our ship struck by privateers & stripped of wine, pigs, our best two sailors, & kept in Rattlesnake's lee a day, in pistol range, off Sandy Hook New York is trifling. Landed, sunburned & excited, I learn that the body remembers motion: rooms & streets swoop seawise. I laugh at my sailor's walk but am suddenly weak— burning, I ride long arcs, moan, crest in sunlight & slide, dizzy, down. Is it water makes such huge noise? Some dark thing looms, I struggle, drenched, in a disarray of quilts— So my English conies pirated, fevered, Quakered. They wear gray dresses, & when they open windows trees waver in ordinary light & I am John James, agent 9 in America for Audubon pere who is words on paper here, an Atlantic of days away from Rozier & me, men of business. 10 ...

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