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Yet the hand on my shoulder fears To feel my own wingblades spring, To feel me sink slowly away In my hair turned loose like a thought Ofa fisherbird dying in flight. IfI opened my arms, I could hear Every shell in the sea find the word It has tried to put into my mouth. Broad flight would become ofmy dancing, And I would obsess the whole sea, But I keep rising and singing With my last breath. Upon my back, With his hand on my unborn wing, A man rests easy as sunlight Who has kept himselffree ofthe forms Ofthe deaf, down-soaring dead, And me laid out and alive For nothing at all, in his arms. A View ofFuJeiyama after the War Wind, and all the midges in the air, On wings you cannot see, awake Where they must have been sleeping in flight. I breathe, and twenty miles away Snow streams from the mountain top And all other mountains are nothing. The ground ofthe enemy's country Shakes; my bones settle back where they stand. Through the bloom ofgnats in the sun, Shaken less than my heart by the tremor, The blossom ofa cherry tree appears. The mountain returns my last breath, And my hair blows, weightless as snow. When it is still, when it is as still as this, Drowning with Others / LOO It could be a country where no one Ever has died but oflove. I take the snow's breath and I speak it. What I say has the form ofa flame Going all through the gnats like their spirit, And for a swarming moment they become, Almost, my own drunk face in the air Against the one mountain in Heaven. It is better to wait here quietly, Not for my face to take flight, But for someone to come from the dead Other side ofthe war to this place: Who thinks ofthis ground as his home, Who thinks no one else can be here, And that no one can see him pass His hand through a visage ofinsects, His hand through the cone ofthe mountain To pluck the flower. But will he feel His sobbing be dug like a wellspring Or a deep water grow from his lids To light, and break up the mountain Which sends his last breath from its summit As it dances together again? Can he know that to live at the heart Ofhis saved, shaken life, is to stand Overcome by the enemy's peace? TheIs/and A light come from my head Showed how to give birth to the dead That they might nourish me. In a wink ofthe blinding sea I woke through the eyes, and beheld No change, but what had been, And what cannot be seen The Island / 101 ...

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