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With the motion ofadolescent walking, none Lumbers as it should. Still, it is there In trios ofgirls, in fake folk singers From Brooklyn, and he enters, anywhere, His son's life without the wakingto -it, the irreplaceable motion Ofa body. Bongoes. Steel Guitars. A precious cheapness He would have grown out of. Something. Music. SledBurial) Dream Cerenwny While the south rains, the north Is snowing, and the dead southerner Is taken there. He lies with the top ofhis casket Open, his hair combed, the particles in the air Changing to other things. The train stops In a small furry village, and men in flap-eared caps And others with women's scarves tied around their heads And business hats over those, unload him, And one ofthem reaches inside the coffin and places The southerner's hand at the center Ofhis dead breast. They load him onto a sled, An old-fashioned sled with high-curled runners, Drawn by horses with bells, and begin To walk out oftown, past dull red barns Inching closer to the road as it snows Harder, past an army ofgunny-sacked bushes, Past horses with flakes in the hollows oftheir sway-backs, Past round faces drawn by children On kitchen windows, all shedding basic-shaped tears. The coffin top still is wide open; His dead eyes stare through his lids, Not fooled that the snow is cotton. The woods fall Slowly offall ofthem, until they are walking Between rigid little houses ofice-fishers On a plain which is a great plain ofwater Buckdancer's Choice / 222 Until the last rabbit track fails, and they are At the center. They take axes, shovels, mattocks, Dig the snow away, and saw the ice in the form Ofhis coffin, lifting the slab like a door Without hinges. The snow creaks under the sled As they unload him like hay, holding his weight by ropes. Sensing an unwanted freedom, a fish Slides by, under the hole leading up through the snow To nothing, and is gone. The coffin's shadow Is white, and they stand there, gunny-sacked bushes, Summoned from village sleep into someone else's dream Ofdeath, and let him down, still seeing the flakes in the air At the place they are born ofpure shadow Like his dead eyelids, rocking for a moment like a boat On utter foreignness, before he fills and sails down. Gamecock Fear, jealousy and murder are the same When they put on their long reddish feathers, Their shawl neck and moccasin head In a tree bearing levels ofwomen. There is yet no thread Oflight, and his scabbed feet tighten, Holding sleep as though it were lockjaw, His feathers damp, his eyes crazed And cracked like the eyes Ofa chicken head cut offor wrung-necked While he waits for the sun's only cry All night building up in his throat To leap out and turn the day red, To tumble his hens from the pine tree, And then will go down, his hackles Up, looking everywhere for the other Cock who could not be there, Head ruffed and sullenly stepping Gamecock / 223 ...

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