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32  Voices’ End They must go through the Valley of Thorns, but they find it a place of springs. Psalm 84 Notes dot the page in ways for which we cannot account, the rise and fall of dactyls like the rise and fall of crimson in autumn, the stems of notes pointing our way first up then down the scale—the wellspring of my singing bringing a woman deaf from birth nearby, her hearing aid angled as if to say you too are doing well. We sing all alone in the silence of disbelief, as if no story had been written just for us, the voices now gone in the clarion call of winter: its white haze the white paper on which crows seem like notes, its evergreen prickly as the heat of constant thinking. Let go of every thing, the past as holly berries on shrubs, the future as longing in the gray and white clouds, the present as the thin places whose sound we must take note of. What has this world left us but horizontal lines upon the page, languages in verse and note, our ears tuned to the frequency of longing, of snow flakes falling? ...

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