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47 BackThen I couldn’t understand the sonic boom, the sacred texts of Vishnu might as well have been my mother’s scribbled shopping list— my favorite swami waved handkerchiefs above a colored vase and doves appeared. My father never knew I drove around in Studebakers, listening to my friends grind down his gears, stomping on cigarettes even as I recited Wordsworth’s “The World IsToo Much with Us.” In other words I thought the poet a lawyer, representing some crime where I’m the victim: I got paid for feeling bad in three-four time. I’d never seen that statue of Donatello’s, the one that radiated, girl-boy, boy-girl. Heard the shapely mass Mingus made of “Fables of Faubus,” dreaming from his bass. I never listened to voices in my head that made a screech of pure cacophony. Such as The bride was battered by the bantam rooster. That mother never found herself another husband drove me fast and far away. Only a few of us have premonitions. For the rest, even if we never hear the cough that’s precursor to the cancer, we still expect a handrail to hold, a house in the country, we don’t expect theWall to fall, to be dumber than dirt, for corpses to slide ditchward in the rainstorm. Frankly we expect the fascist to stay a fascist, we expect the moral of the story. ...

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