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Why did I need that empty space to live? The hand in the dark was my own, God knows whose cars. The clay gods lean, and cast shadows under the stars, Enjoying the blameless flowers on their Boston roof. The watering-can’s bland nozzle gleams like a hoof. To Salter’s Point Frances Wadsworth Valentine 1880–1959 Here in Framingham, black, unlikely Wheel spoking into mild Republican townships, I have come to where the world drops off Into an emptiness that cannot bear Or lacks the center to compel The barest sparrow feather’s falling. Maybe our mortal calling Is, after all, to fall Regarded by some most tender care: But here, the air Has grown too thin: the world drops off That could imagine Heaven, or so much care. Framingham is building. The savage ring And shake of the drill turn up your morphined sleep. I fall, still in earth’s monstrous pull, To kiss your hands, your planeless face. Oh, you are right Not to know your death-bed’s place; To wander in your drugs from Framingham To Salter’s Point, the long blond beaches where You and your brothers peeled oranges and swam While your parents looked on in daguerreotype. dream barker 43 Your iron bedstead there was white like this: And in this grave, unspeakable night, Beyond the pull of gravity or care, You have no place: nor we: You have taken the summer house, the hedge, The brook, the dog, our air, our ground down with you, And all the tall gray children can run Away from home now and walk forever and ever And come to nothing but this mouthful of earth, All endings over. Lines in Dejection for my sister Remember how we spread our hair on the sea, Phosphorous fans, the moon’s edge crumbling under Moving pieces of sky? Ghostly weeds loitered Like misty Thetis’s hair, or some sea-monster’s Ancient whiskers, floating around our knees; Moony children, we drifted, and no god or monster Could have seemed foreign then to our globe of water. Remember Lying like still shells on the glass water? The paper moon opened, a Japanese water flower Drifting free of its shell in the bowl of the sky. Who poured it out? In twenty years The bay is still in its place, they are still there, Walking slowly by the water. Have they been here, all along? Have we? Back, back, I strike out from the ancestral stare And now the bowl’s shadow composes what I see: The weeds cradle me and draw me under, under. 44 door in the mountain ...

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