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PAR T Buckdancer's Choice So I would hear out those lungs, The air split into nine levels, Some gift oftongues ofthe whistler In the invalid's bed: my mother, Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations ofone song; It is called Buckdancer's Choice. For years, they have all been dying Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Oftraveling minstrel shows; With them also an old woman Was dying ofbreathless angina, Yet still found breath enough To whistle up in my head A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel, An ex-slave who thrivingly danced To the ring ofhis own clashing light Through the thousand variations ofone song All day to my mother's prone music, The invalid's warbler's note, While I crept close to the wall Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, Her tongue like a mockingbird's break Buckdancer's Choice / 201 TWO Through stratum after stratum ofa tone Proclaiming what choices there are For the last dancers oftheir kind, For ill women and for all slaves Ofdeath, and children enchanted at walls With a brass-beating glow underfoot, Not dancing but nearly risen Through barnlike, theatrelike houses On the wings ofthe buck and wing. Faces Seen Once Faces seen once are seen To fade from around one feature, Leaving a chin, a scar, an expression Forever in the air beneath a streetlight, Glancing in boredom from the window Ofa bus in a country town, Showing teeth for a moment only, All ofwhich die out ofmind, except One silver one. Who had the dog-bitten ear? The granulated lids? The birthmark? Faces seen once change always Into and out ofeach other: An eye you saw in Toulon Is gazing at you down a tin drainpipe You played with as a dull child In Robertstown, Georgia. There it is April; the one eye Concentrates, the rusty pipe Is trembling; behind the eye Is a pine tree blurring with tears: Buckdancer's Choice / 202 ...

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