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December Shadow —Then how to address the place where the soul was not. Should you have said, standing next to the trench, this should have been you? This darkness was not the terror of what we do to each other, or the delicious sexual darkness he'd brought you or the black corridors of the female body— remember the early diagrams, what the inside of a woman looks like? A cow's skull. This darkness was the protection of the child, it included the vast fluttering as the oak included the moths with its shadow— remember in the brilliant day long ago, the ball coming toward you? You played with the other children like this— not as anything— blocked the sun with your nonbeing as it were, but by that pewter shadow you could be affirmed . . . One by one they kissed you. One by one the guests advancedthemselves into the night where you would have been had they looked for you though it was not in the dim night that you'd planned to receive them but at midday, when the druid oak blossomed with moths, with being gone— 9 ...

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