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—I am your cloth of gold swaddled firstchild safe in danger (you are in danger) one hand curled around your bending neck, the other rested on your black breast, just above your star. Winter in the world is winter here in you but summer, too, oh my play, my eyes, my light. Black hill of consolation! There is no book and my name is written in it, my heart makes an earth crib for your heart. The Year of the Snake I had to ask you questions: if I didn’t, well you’d think I’d robbed a bank. And then, blood all over, God, I would’ve robbed a bank. But my old God, my questions were too small for you. You were so much older, you knew so much. You used your words like bricks, whole leathery old books black with words, to wall me out, words gold as booze, to leave the room, leave me, leave us. Oh since that time, I have learned to let you go and live . . . Now my friend happy as God I sit down and comb your hair. Your hair shines like honey like sex like the current in the river. the river at wolf 187 The river combs out our anger our tenderness. Our silent tenderness not my or mine or yours. Your unspeaking mouth shining. Shining lifesnake drinking at my lips milky with life. The One You Wanted to Be Is the One You Are She saying, You don’t have to do anything, you don’t even have to be, you Only who are, you nobody from nowhere, without one sin or one good quality, without one book, without one word, without even a comb, you! The one you wanted to be is the one you are. Come play . . . And he saying, Look at me! I don’t know how . . . Their breath like a tree’s breath. Their silence like a deer’s silence. Tolstoy wrote about this: all misunderstanding. Ironwood November 17th Dear Michael, I had gotten Ironwood, The Final Issue, in the mail; I put it on the table, and lay down to sleep, and dreamed I was talking to you. You said, “You’re much younger than my mother, of course, but you look 188 door in the mountain ...

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