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Part I After Elegies Almost two years now I’ve been sleeping, a hand on a table that was in a kitchen. Five or six times you have come by the window; as if I’d been on a bus sleeping through the Northwest, waking up, seeing old villages pass in your face, sleeping. A doctor and his wife, a doctor too, are in the kitchen area, wide awake. We notice things differently: a child’s handprint in a clay plate, a geranium, aluminum balconies rail to rail, the car horns of a wedding, blurs of children in white. LIFE shots of other children. Fire to paper; black faces, judge faces, Asian faces; flat earth your face fern coal ‘Autumn Day’ Who has no house now will not build him one . . . Will waken, read, and write long letters . . . —Rilke, ‘Autumn Day’ The house in the air is rising, not settling between any trees. ordinary things 103 Its lines may have come here by machine, wirephoto, they soften to dots in the rain. What draws you on so hard? You would like to think about resting a minute on the mobbed walk or the electrocardiograph table to ask about the house there—dark, stone, floating out over the edge of the buildings, someone, something, it may be, inside— but you can’t stop here: the dangerous air, the crowds, the lights, the hardening Indian Summer . . . strange quiet, with time for work, your evenings, you will write long letters this winter, you have your friends, and the names of friends of friends. He said, “When I found where we had crashed, in the snow, the two of us, alone, I made a plan. It takes all my energy to like it. The trees keep thinning, and the small animals. She swims over me every night like warmth, like my whole life going past my eyes. She is the sleep they talk about, and some days all I can want is sleep.” Forces This man, blind and honored, listens to his student reader; this man did what he thought 104 door in the mountain ...

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