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Your helmets or thickening haircuts) Your white coats) your rock-poundingforeheads) For our children lie there beyond us In the still) foreign city ofpain Singing backward into the world To those neverseen before) Old cool-handed doctors andyoung ones) Cappedgirls bearing vessels ofglucose) Ginger ward boys) pan handlers) technicians) Thieves) nightwalkers) truckers) and drunkards Who must hea1; not listening) them: Them) crying: for they rise only unto Thosefew who transcend themselves) The superhuman tenderness ofstrangers. The Celebration All wheels; a man breathed fire, Exhaling like a blowtorch down the road And burnt the stripper's gown Above her moving-barely feet. A condemned train climbed from the earth Up stilted nightlights woming in a track. I ambled along in that crowd Between the gambling wheels At carnival time with the others Where the dodgem cars shuddered, sparking On grillwire, each in his vehicle half In control, halfhelplessly power-mad As he was in the traffic that brought him. No one blazed at me; then I saw My mother and my father, he leaning On a dog-chewed cane, she wrapped to the nose In the fur ofexhausted weasels. I believed them buried miles back In the country, in the faint sleep The Celebration / 209 Ofthe old, and had not thought to be On this ofall nights compelled To follow where they led, not losing Sight, with my heart enlarging whenever I saw his crippled Stetson bob, saw her With the teddy bear won on the waning Whip ofhis right arm. They laughed; She clung to him; then suddenly The Wheel ofwheels was turning The colored night around. They climbed aboard. My God, they rose Above me, stopped themselves and swayed Fifty feet up; he pointed With his toothed cane, and took in The whole Midway till they dropped, Came down, went from me, came and went Faster and faster, going up backward, Cresting, out-topping, falling roundly. From the crowd I watched them, Their gold teeth flashing, Until my eyes blurred with their riding Lights, and I turned from the standing To the moving mob, and went on: Stepped upon sparking shocks Ofrecognition when I saw my feet Among the others, knowing them given, Understanding the whirling impulse From which I had been born, The great gift ofshaken lights, The being wholly lifted with another, All this having all and nothing To do with me. Believers, I have seen The wheel in the middle ofthe air Where old age rises and laughs, And on Lakewood Midway became In five strides a kind ofloving, A mortal, a dutiful son. Buckdancer's Choice / 2 I 0 ...

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