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There is nothing here, now, to watch The bedclothes whirl into flakes. What should be warm in these blankets Has powdered down into its own Steel-blue and feathery visions Ofweddings opposed by the world: Is hovering over A dead cotton field, which awaits Its touch as awaiting completion: Is building the pinewoods again For this one night oftheir lives: With the equilibrium Ofbones, is falling, falling, Falling into the river. To Landrum GuYJ Beginning to Write atSixty One man in a house Consumed by the effort oflistening, Sets down a worried phrase upon a paper. It is poor, though it has come From the table as out ofa wall, From his hand as out ofhis heart. To sixty years it has come At the same rate oftime as he. He cannot tell it, ever, what he thinks. It is time, he says, he must Be thinking ofnothing but singing, Be singing ofnothing but love. But the right word cannot arrive Through the dark, light house ofone man With his savage hand on a book, With a cricket seizing slowly on his ear: Drowning with Others / I2 6 One man in a house cannot hear His ear, with his hair falling out from the quick. Even to himselfhe cannot say Except with not one word, How he hears there is no more light Than this, nor any word More anywhere: how he is drunk On hope, and why he calls himselfmad. Weeping is steadily built, and does not fall From the shadow sitting slowly behind him On the wall, like an angel who writes him a letter To tell him his only talent is too late To tell, to weep, to speak, or to begin Here, or ever. Here, where he begins. FacingAfrica These are stone jetties, And, in the close part ofthe night, Connected to my feet by long Warm, dangling shadows On the buttressed water, Boats are at rest. Beyond, the harbor mouth opens Much as you might believe A human mouth would open To say that all things are a darkness. I sit believing this As the boats beneath me dissolve And shake with a haunted effort To come into being again, And my son nods at my side, Looking out also Into dark, through the painted Living shadows ofdead-still hulls Facing Africa / 127 ...

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