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IN THE TREE HOUSEATNIGHT And now the green household is dark. The half-moon completely is shining On the earth-lighted tops of the trees. To be dead, a house must be still. The floor and the walls wave me slowly; I am deep in them over my head. The needles and pine cones about me Are full ofsmall birds at their roundest, Their fist without mercy gripping Hard down through the tree to the roots To sing back at light when they feel it. We lie here like angels in bodies, My brothers and I, one dead, The other asleep from much living, In mid-air huddled beside me. Dark climbed to us here as we climbed Up the nails I have hammered all day Through the sprained, comic rungs ofthe ladder Of broom handles, crate slats, and laths Foot by foot up the trunk to the branches Where we came out at last over lakes Ofleaves, offields disencumbered ofearth That move with the moves of the spirit. Each nail that sustains us I set here; Each nail in the house is now steadied By my dead brother's huge, freckled hand. Through the years, he has pointed his hammer Up into these limbs, and told us That we must ascend, and all lie here. Step after step he has brought me, Embracing the trunk as his body, Drowning with Others 33 34 Shaking its limbs with my heartbeat, Till the pine cones danced without wind And fell from the branches like apples. In the arm-slender forks ofour dwelling I breathe my live brother's light hair. The blanket around us becomes As solid as stone, and it sways. With all my heart, I close The blue, timeless eye ofmy mind. Wind springs, as my dead brother smiles And touches the tree at the root; A shudder ofjoy runs up The trunk; the needles tingle; One bird uncontrollably cries. The wind changes round, and I stir Within another's life. Whose life? Who is dead? Whose presence is living? When may I fall strangely to earth, Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit? Can two bodies make up a third? To sing, must I feel the world's light? My green, graceful bones fill the air With sleeping birds. Alone, alone And with them I move gently. I move at the heart of the world. ...

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