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6 n e w p o e m s e x t r a v a g a n c e It is a huge extravagance hiring a car to get home the final sixty-seven miles, having missed the last shuttle from the Atlanta airport to Athens by five minutes. So I enjoy it, napping or nearly napping on the middle van seat. It is a raining February night. A cheerful Ethiopian man is driving, steady and very fast, passing the trucks with their vast sleeping compartments behind their cabs, spaceships. It feels like I have not watched traffic sideways since I was a child. At seventy, going eighty, eighty-five. The drips on the sidewindows do their slow slide toward the rear. How can that be? What is the physics of such slowness? We are going fast, but the drips are finding a leisurely way, stopping awhile, shivering, continuing on, as though making watery decisions, this magnificently dawdling troop of Taoist masters, who arrive at the rubber edging of my window from up in the nowhere of this night’s coldfront. • • • 7 n e w p o e m s I graph with fingers their progress on the convex pane. Whatever presences we are blessed by, we must bless others with, to keep the blessings moving along, the nearly formless ones who drop vertically in, and just for a sideways drawn-out moment are with us, and we see them held supinely in the custody of an amicable Ethiopian man. We feel them sliding through and out the bottom of being as they become songs and sentences, the notions and beauty of the liquid fire of presence, in people we meet, in the nightair we breathe cupfuls of. ...

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