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55 Thoreau’s Beans Here’s where he exists, his hunger grasping how to cultivate, then gorge, and now he wakes inside the dead-mule smell of lilac around his cottage, and now he wrestles with roots in the sun, struggling, as a husband, with the harness, and while lancing blisters he remembers the view from Ktaadn, how a cloud soaked him on its upper slope— no brother but the self— and he returns meek among the asphodel even more determined that his crop will thrive, becoming almost desperate for long pails of water, while beneath him is what he summons: brute feet, his hands smelling like leeks— in a notebook this is his thrift and estate: the stems weakened until he finds them 56 cow chips, which he must have felt for in the dark but never wrote about stealing from his neighbors’ fields, and now he sees himself, without the pond’s reflection, for what he is, a failed guide, since what’s fleeting can’t be guarded: colors of badgers, the sober points of wrens, so few words, outlined, whipped from their oily wings. ...

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