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44 In cycles, I replace the term father with Neil Diamond. I do it at Easter, traipsing through woods and meadows. I have an image of him lost in a parking lot, wearing a crash helmet and short sleeves, finding a particular storefront newly vacant and marking this in his posture. He visits planetariums, eats hot dogs. His process is of leaving. He turns a key. He loops a hand behind a passenger’s back. He doesn’t know the transformation that places him beneath lights in a studded suit, where he plays and is at-play. When he sings, intensity is meaning, and in this there is rebirth and also absence, a paternal kind, e.g., the distance between stadiums, and the black where the audience hunts, correctly, for a sure, dumb earnestness, his clenched hand and wide stare. TWELVE SONGS ...

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