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Better or Worse I. Daily, the kindergarteners passed my porch. I loved their likeness and variety, their selves in line like little monosyllables, but huggable— I wasn't meant to grab them, ever, up into actual besmooches or down into grubbiest tumbles, my lot was not to have them, in the flesh. Was it better or worse to let their lovability go by untouched, and just watch over their river of everinbraiding relations? I wouldn't mother them or teach. We couldn't be each other's others; maybe, at removes, each other's each. II. Each toddler had a hand-hold on a loop of rope, designed to haul the whole school onward in the sidewalk stream— like pickerel through freshets, at the pull of something else's will, the children spun and bobbled, three years old and four (or were they little drunken Buddhas, buoyant, plump?). They looked now to the right, now to the sky, and now toward nothing (nothing was too small)— they followed a thread of destination, chain of command, order of actual rope that led to what? Who knew? For here and now in one child's eye there was a yellow truck, 39 and in another's was a burning star; but from my own perspective, overhead, adult, where trucks and suns had lost their luster, they were one whole baby-rush toward a target, toward the law of targets, fledge in the wake of an arrowhead; a bull's-eye bloomed, a red eight-sided sign. What did I wish them? Nothing I foresaw. 40 ...

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