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I-77 North: 2009 The blue ridge is a breve for vowels sung in mountain, the highway’s long da capo like a ballad you tried to teach me.All day I drive, taking breaths in viaducts, tasting slack, dry throat, valleys split for blackness.A bridge arches beneath me, pure drama, bowing.This breve’s meant to hold—over noisome runoff below— or, as in language, to collar words, as in distance shortened. If you were here you’d say next to nothing, and make us sing instead: about this cedar ridge, fit for cutting dulcimers, bodies the shape of mountains. 3 You I keep singing, so you’ll hear us wound by one long story— even now, you wouldn’t speak of it, or know my figure whittled out of yours. Hum: the hollow below, the same mine that tracked dark across your granddaddy’s heart and lungs, his breath always short until he closed up in hardwood. I drive here, the place you come from. It grips, asks me to learn it by stench. Here is the bend where the colliery tank turns: a radio’s knob, loud, louder where I hold, round the curve. 4 ...

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