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Nearing Chernobyl Summer 1987 Outside a village we stop by the road: the air hangs pale, the gold-leaved birches shiver dew from their fingers. The crust of the earth breaks beneath my feet as I pick out a path in the tentative way that all cityfolk walk on unmown grass. But there’s tentative and tentative: this morning I examine every blade, every stalk, jump at each crackle of the shifting frost, fear that enchantment will steal over me. As if enchantment can be scented on the wind, or tasted in a gooseberry. As if it rides on the backs of the men plowing fields there, beyond the trees; or rises, steaming, from this tree root where I crouch, concealed. Perhaps I shouldn’t touch the tree’s bole, the long grass; perhaps then it will pass me by, as in a fairy tale whose heroine wears an invisible ring to wander unscathed through Death’s portal and back. For there’s enchantment aplenty here: the cold wheeling of comets, breath of the sun howling down on the rump of a woman peeing by a tree in Ukraine. I carry the dust of the universe on my shoes. 13 ...

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