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57 RUDOLPH ON THE ROOF Dinner in the morning. Mixed lights, daylight tangled in cold fluorescence, then the superheated living room (suits, black shoes, black purses, rosaries, flower clocks) and sun and unset moon stalemated at opposite ends of the sky measuring the last declensions. The ring finger will be sprung from the knuckle, the spine unplugged from the cortex followed by the sunless harvest of the molars, the sockets mortised out, the busted saddle of the ribs in the muddy rot at rest like the hull of a sunken man-o’-war, spine a broken keelson —the sleep of spare parts, what she has become, is now becoming. A foot away the wallpaper suns on daylight that has burned it and turned it to gauze this forty years. On the front lawn the vines persist in clawing the light-impastoed birdbath into plaster crumbs. Her lawn is a Golgotha of rotting manufactures from a dozen tourist traps Lancaster to Paris empretzled in fall’s decay, unmowed, unraked. The living feed their grief pork, feed sorrow mussels al’olio, rice balls, and chocolate cannoli. Heartache and heartburn. They eat at life speed. 58 Aunt May, consoled by her body odor, Uncle Tom, bogarting bonds, and Cousin Vince rifling upstairs drawers for leftover .38 shells and snapshots of Baby Vince. Life is calling out to life. Across the street a dog wanders by, a neighbor’s, smelly, collared and tagged, and it stares pious and color-blind at the simulacrum on the roof— Rudolph with the light-sensor nose, the rack that never wears out, the chocolate eyes unmothered and enduring, the glassy pelt, and posture that never changes but it’s the nose mostly that halts him, has for months, dull and dusk-triggered and blinking up, as night falls, at the sky. ...

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