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Sleep: the room breaks up into blue and red film, long muscles crossing bones, raw pelvis pulled to birth: Incised on stone, bronze, silver Eyes, belly, mouth Circle on circle— Look, by morning noises, in this city island flickering with gold flame, These photographs. The Tollund man. The Windeby girl. The goddess Nerthus. In the middle of a light wood of tall forked trees stripped white at the edge of a bog, in Denmark, we walk slowly out to the field walk slowly by the hacked-out cots of silk bog children. Living Together Dawn, streaks of rose-brown, dry— A car starts up. A needle veers, an hour, a summer . . . Day settles back, on the last century, our trying, our Biblical conviviality. This should, should not, happen, these two people met, or not then, not now; or now. Out in the white Judaic light you move like figures in a lesson; You open your life like a book. Still I hear your story the messenger 131 like a parable, where every word is simple, but how does this one go with the one before, the next . . . Here Now The sky is the same changing colors as the farthest snow. The tall pines float like candles with the current, next to the stream clear with brown leaves. A pitched ceiling, two cots; apple petals; the thin smell of woodsmoke, wood, turpentine . . . My sister, I, who we were then— Downstairs, the grown world bent to its books; low flames, low voices. Sleeplessness . . . Our wooden room —The white cloth on the table between us Forty years, a breath . . . our tall daughters circle like birds, in our light houses, bump into things Their high words, leaving out their lives Quiet-minded, a lightness, this morning; the piece of sea glass next to the window, almost amber, curved like a thumb, a petal 132 door in the mountain ...

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