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249 f r o m n e w w o r d s t h e l a s t r e b i r t h for my parents To fix attention on the dead and not let us wander off a clamp shuts in the chest. Lights grow faint and more numerous. There is only the looking in. Your palm beneath the outer map of skin has an old wound badly sewn up with an ordinary white thread healed in an ugly welt that opens while you look. Inside the hand, a host the small image of a man wrapped in membrane like a toy that’s been buried in the earth. You’ve been tending him for years within your body loving the bare backs of women placing your right hand in cold streams for him, and now you know why. What world you’ve known, the sky itself is densely rooted and nerved here in this icon your one true pregnancy still on the bloodvine like a melon perfecting its stripes with seeds and memory. The dead are way ahead of us, thank God, at the clean wooden tables by the waterfall 250 f r o m n e w w o r d s in the permanent mist talking however they do without using metaphor. Left behind we meditate on something on a pair of pliers changing the bite, open and shut. Wind ruffles a quilt slowly through a week of weather. A crowd with all ages dancing, hands in the air, come to the presence of trees where each inside himself rejoices like fish in shallow rapids or any other sign say the edge of a door or a man running down a flight of steps signs the last rebirth hasn’t yet begun. ...

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