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  • For Wallace Stevens
  • Janet McCann

He would not have her in his house,she came round the back door,delivered a poem like a plucked chicken.

The old guitarist could not entereither, though flakes of his musicdrifted through the window crack.

In the fifties they taught us to playmusic only if we could not dance,my fat fingers blurred the notes.

In the fifties they sang Christmas carolsto neighbors in the melting snow,in the fifties they were all alike,

ginger-bread men made with cookie cuttersor moving down the long assembly linebetween there and here. It is snowing light

on this edge of Levittown, houses take onother forms, some are whales, some areboats, some, translucent amphibians.

He never did ask us in, hot chocolatewould have been an abomination;we sing his name still in the snowy dark. [End Page 96]

Janet McCann
College Station, Texas
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