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29 Lines for the Atrium of a High School The boy in the hallway knows the wonder of imagination. How it turns the trees to young women at night where he can walk among them and feel their leaves graze his face as he walks beneath. He is perhaps sixteen when he sees it: light pooling in the little bowl of the collarbone of a girl walking through the hallway of the school. Brass trophies shine in the morning light that pours from the garden of pine trees and irises outside the tall windows. And here she comes—a girl maybe fifteen with light across her neck and two friends on either side all laughing at something as the crowds of teenagers pass each other giddy in their despairs before the day begins. The image of light filling the scooped-out place of the girl’s collarbone is just that. An image, a detail. He moves along and the days course onward like some ordinary river, like a sentence, the one he is writing today with nothing before him but the changing light of noon. Such light has a thousand ways of being discovered, of being described. Some of them might endure the night. For the boy one illuminates still. It illuminates and illuminates. So what if two people marry and live a long life together? So what such light illuminates still? ...

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