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SELF-PORTRAIT AT 5 A.M. First light, and the starlings name themselves one by one, wind swelling like an ocean, leaf to daggerpointed leaf through the willow. Everything but me seems to have its instruction: the hare shuffling through the brush to its burrow, no-see-ums rising in mute droves, each slat of the venetian blinds an intonation of light. But this is where I keep my allegiances, in this room of no sleep so thick with silence it claims its own configuration: that thin cord of luminance beneath my bedroom door a stropped edge of steel, the image the window holds most clear when I look through it, my face afloat in the glass—yet another false image imposed on my backyard, yet another false image floating freely on the reflection of the waking world. 52 ...

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