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Spare World
- Wesleyan University Press
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Spare World I walked with my traveler through several infinities beside the cstcro under the gray sun. Always the fox sparrows lifting autumn through their bodies. Crows in their judge robes flew overhead and the dirt shone our laughs were tied together, the milky white birdshit with the purple tinge of —(they had been eating berries)—heaped up around the owls' clover. And I loved my traveler but I feared his completeness, the way everything kept , taking him in. And everything took me in because I was beside him. One ragged cypress leaning sideways, as it did. Even the lightning struck, the previously glorious. Even the stumps of the oak were receiving of us, then. —Old Mr. Black-beetlecrossing the trail where is your mate you shiny thing But for my part I noticed everything was split (because of the divorce or the fault line probably) Even two colors of gray in the granite. Each set of needles in the bishop pine short deliberate pairs thrust from the papery wrappings at the end, no pair wanting to be just one needle, both halves wanting to be separate; and the hemlock at this time in summer has this separate, sort of dry interior, like styrofoam. Makes it rattle, almost. 78 But, there is no way to tell you how beautiful he was, climbing the dry hill, holding the unplanned bouquet of the several dying grasses which had come to him,, of course, so willingly— wild wheat wild rye wild barley Each with its split dialectical seed (split but not divorced, split but orderly) he held with his sexual hand those agreeablegrasses —seeds falling off them, the ambassador of outside, the source of gladness— and the meadows hurried brown, the greatly unstressed fields turned middle-aged and handsome, not wanting to be themselves anymore; the grasses wanted to be just like him. O.K. but. How to walk beside another person, was what was wrong with me. (Or, not wrong exactly. Just like the women of my era.) Birds of the estero could walk beside. Greater yellowlegs stepped goldenly beside the willet. Could could (could) Could. Goldenly toward the one gleaming trout. Surely the willet could manage on its own, two dark wing smudges holding it up (could, could, could) The briefly seen. My love stood beside; I watched him plain who watched a flock of (according to him) sandpipers turn together 4 ways, like a box —gray white black nothing— they turned together 4 ways like a box mailed out to sea 79 [44.205.2.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:07 GMT) and as he took my hand I felt the split in nature mend not because I learned, the split learned; I tried to cross to count his otherness and when I couldn't count it counted, that bright love counted me— 80 ...