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22 Nefarious The literal poppies seem so paper-thin that to be moved by them is to be moved by a letter, a signature, is to displace how red they are— it’s florid and rhapsodic to compare them to late Beethoven sonatas, so obsessive on so little material, a few clusters of notes twisted and transfigured, darkened and heightened before they’re pulverized, the memory of them more colorful than the petals themselves, basically because I can’t finish a thought before words line up and demand to be said: it’s nefarious to say hotel room and think prison cell (the sink a foot from the bed), her scent before it, looking out at the courtyard just before the wrens break out into their high-pitched Eden, before the lazy drawl of daily speech darts up from the lobby.What’s raw about their unfettered sweetness, what’s opaque about the late night air, bleaching a tint at a time, 23 lumbers toward the scattered light of morning until they’re both hushed and dim. I can’t decide if I’m dense now or was dense then. I hate to look down on them, striding to their separate cars, looking sturdy and impatient, making lists, meaning the poppies stand in like “symbols of passion” in those medieval dramas where secrets are borne by the body of Christ, by the word of Christ. It’s nefarious to say lumber when you mean dogwood. To forget the window and what’s forged out there, with duty and labor and contempt for the human soul. Don’t you get tired of talking to Jesus, beseeching the not there, expressing sorrow for all the sweaty, severed, transfigured spells that slip through the soporific madness of the moral lessons? How tempting it is to compare them, to use a barrage of words to drop over them. I wanted to write it down as it appeared, with everything open about us: not me, not the person jotting this down from a distance, but how we watched them approach the courtyard in their separate cars, almost ready to take back the world— I knew I was going back to the shattered ordinary, the waking factory, the dimly lit abbeys, the prosaic foot-tapping that pays for everything. ...

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