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The sky is the same changing blue, and green, as the burning snow. So much must be asleep under this white quiet, sleep, sleep, low voices, dust hair, under the eyes the impossible compass fingers of the god. The Forgiveness Dream: Man from the Warsaw Ghetto He looked about six or seven, only much too thin. It seemed right he would be there, but everything, every lineation, was slow . . . He was speaking in Polish, I couldn’t answer him. He pointed at the window, the trees, or the snow, or our silver auditorium. I said to him in English, “I’ve lived the whole time here, in peace. A private life.” “In shame,” I said. He nodded. He was old now, kind, my age, or my mother’s age: He nodded, and wrote in my notebook—“Let it be good.” He frowned, and stopped, as if he’d forgotten something, and wrote again, “Let it.” I walk, and stop, and walk— touch the birch bark shining, powdery, cold: taste the snow, hot on my tongue— pure cold, licked from the salt of my hand: the messenger 133 This quiet, these still unvisitable stars move with choices. Our kin are here. Were here. Turn This is the new apartment new painted livingroom its table, its bed, its chair. It is floating, and the earth’s bright rim is floating through an indifferent blank, without color, without consolation— The pregnant woman with a child at home rests, has a cup of tea, closes her eyes . . . I want to walk in the winter field again . . . Was peacefulness ever what we were after? She thinks of the child, who wants the tea, who wants her eyes, her mouth, her hands, who pulls her out to the field to the thick of things away from the thick of things. A woman stands at the new window. Torso: a bronze Matisse back: in the museum garden. Its children playing, still, inside its hollow part. Its strength thickens, simplifies. Grows quieter. The first day’s quiet. The second; the second year. I’m taking up my life. If you were here who I am honest with 134 door in the mountain ...

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