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3 WALKING CROSS TOWN At the Shunk Street library I came across a definition in the OED that so knocked me out with its beauty I xeroxed the whole page, stuck it in my pocket and walked out and kept right on walking: north on Nineteenth, then cross town on Chestnut to Walnut; then south on Ninth past my old girlfriend’s Pine Street apartment, and by now it was getting dark. The Sidgies were building fires of studs, box lids, and barrel-slats and tossing crates of spoiled produce into city trash trucks where drivers dozed in their cabs. Way later, past midnight, I’m wandering through the neighborhoods east of Broad and get lost somewhere south of Tasker. The little streets, blunt and unobliging, had me walking in circles until suddenly I was standing in somebody’s bedroom— a blind corner store entrance, one of those cul-de-sacs that nestle like vectors in vectors. A big mutt snored on the bed, a blue Christmas light smeared a pillowed human outline into its paws, and the two breathed as one, two creatures asleep as one pulse, uncompromised. How strange we are, how radiant our poverty! All this goes on out of sight, in creaturely darkness but only once, and my once is another’s never. What ever happened to that page, those creatures, to me? The sky was a star blot and the pale swab of the Milky Way whitened the general dark so much I forgot how alone we are most of the time, and how lost, and how late. ...

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