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The name of a good doctor, your letter said. I wait in his green waiting room; my hands are big, pale, idle. Neutral, intent, his secretary calls me ‘Dear,’ like one of my own children. He is kind. I can’t last out the hour. The window panes behind him stare me down, the lenses over his eyes. He asks, What brings me here? But I feel—not naked— but absent, made of air because how could I ever have told anyone how it was, how the lighted house went out in the gin brightness you called ‘the war’—and that I did this to you— I did not do this . . . Birthday Letter from South Carolina for Sarah, 21 Yellow apple star inside the apple seed star quiet Walking up this quiet, red-earth road, I think of you there, near the whiteedged harbor; in a yellow kerchief, in the blowing sunlight, you walk along the concrete of the holding world. You hold it all to your chest, the blue day, night, long reading, long talk, —You hold your kind, stumbling, sure home.deep.blue 171 life in your hands. Indian cloth, the goose-neck desk light . . . Basho spent the first thirty years of his life apprenticing; four years alone in a small hut on the outskirts of Tokyo; the last ten years walking. Walking here today I saw him, Basho, at the far edge of the field; and you alongside him; your steps, his long black and white steps stirring up red mica dust to drift across the new day’s light, and the heat. The Counselor Retires, and Then He Dies Getting each other’s jokes, each other’s absences; my first wise practice at intimacy; and now the hero shrugs on his London raincoat and walks away, down the shiny street: it’s a death, Doc. No more of you in your pale green office, your bright green pants, your lounging, affectionate smile, you cradling your dog when he had a cold, the way you would cradle me, if I was a dog, or a baby, the way God cradles us, only we can’t feel it . . . Shea, guard me and keep me, as I keep you; 172 door in the mountain ...

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