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9 Diva The very veery this heart thumps for, she seems a mere heartbeat away, a buoy bobbing in a bay on whose shores I sit tongue-tied to the sound of a fishing boat tonguing the soft-sand shore-lap. It’s March. And if I reel it in, it is real. So to step in, swivel dingy oarlocks and plod out nearer the buoy seems the very act of throating a bird as one might stroke a chicken neck to pacify. Isadora Duncan knows (or knew) all too well this feather-fingering of Fate, both divas. Stay with me. I am moving quite fast, sculling by the buoy before I know it as the very emblem of the veery I would like each chatty bird in this narrative to be. Stay with me, croons the buoy Bette-Midlerian as I scull by thwartwise. Thickets rise 10 out of the shore muck starboard, my skull now heavy with chirping. Stay with me, and I’d like to slip out and slide to the spout end of that buoy throatwise and risen to song. This is weird, I tell myself, by which I mean the Anglo-Saxon kind, which kills the very veery my heart adores. Heart, if you have the heart, help me swing the dinghy round. We have but one tongue between us. ...

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