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Your wife and I were sitting up late in the kitchen, drinking coffee, talking like sisters. A child cried; one of us went to her, held her. Here, sitting up late, with a friend, listening, talking, touching her hand, his hand, I touch your hand. No one says anything much. No one leaves anyone. Susan’s Photograph I am the razor that has been put away, also the wrist in the photograph, and—lately—also the photographer, the friend, the taxi, the hospital room, the three other women, their visitors, the flowers, and the nurse. At the end of that summer I started going to paramedical school at night. Days I still talk to my students about all the dead overexcitable poets; all their friends; and the living; and show the old newsreels where they keep leaving each other, old people, children, soldiers; and the parades: the general, the waving people, the black horses, the black limousines, the mules, the tall gray puppets. But this photograph here: a woman in a country room, in western Massachusetts, in peace, so sad and grained: now I see you look up, outside the frame— this room here, friends, a table, a book or two, paper, see you have all you need, ordinary things 123 —even in prison you would have your childhood— see you go on and do what you ought to do, it is enough, now, anywhere, with everyone you love there to talk to. Outside the Frame It is enough, now, anywhere, with everyone you love there to talk to. And to listen. Slowly we can tell each other some things about our lives: runs, rests, brief resolutions; falls, and lulls; hard joyful runs, in certainty; dull, sweet durances, human silences; look back in at the children, the regular, neutral flicker of their blood; pale, solemn, long-legged animal-gods in their sleep, growing into their lives, in their sleep. Forces (2): Song Weeds breaking up through stone: our hold on our own hollows, the quick, curved line of a smile: bare, our own ribs shelter us: a boy’s cold, white fingers around a match: heart belling: hollow, quick, through the live horn, the bone, to this day, calm. 124 door in the mountain ...

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