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8 3 R W O R L D ’ S S H A D O W B R I A N S W A N N – for Grace Schulman On my adobe’s red-earth floor something is making the light jump like a jack-rabbit, up and o√ whitewashed walls. The flowers outside take in canvas or run it out, stretching their brightness to morning’s indigo which they breathe in and turn glassine, and I think: things are only so deep, emblems of rhythms not the rhythms themselves, hints to pick and twist to other dimensions the way those buzzards are rising out of sight in wide baldacchinos following air’s grains, while round them gray skeins draw down and across to form the skyloom the Tewa say the world is woven on. The rain is still in distant mountains as the sun breaks free and tries to stand alone, then begins to move toward me, drawing cloud-threads into a lovely tree that flickers and unfurls. It’s a trick, I know, as I watch it spread into a huge bole and branches draped with Spanish moss, but hanging from a bough by his neck is a black man, a doll in the photo I found as a child, a marionette that still stays on that tree twisting, an ornament bloody and unsexed, as worshipers look up smiling, posing for the camera, men women and children my age at their world’s renewal, so I close my eyes, trying to trace the lovely tree climbing from the earth over sage and creosote bush, up into the world of faded star-bones, into the icy vastness whose shadow this world is. ...

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