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80 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g l o v e f o r c l o u d s There was a time when a man said poems and friendship grew visible. Whole evenings, phrases came out of his mouth like breasts. Language nourished with silence as an infant opening for the nipple. Naked words appear and enter the listeners. It is not strange and dreamlike. It feels natural and fully awake. This might seem strange, my standing reading words on paper. I look up and speak and look down. But I do not apologize. Now is no less wonderful than then. We write in a coffeehouse or parked alone in a car. We print pages and revise on the porch for months, years, tinkering. I am climbing through a mist rising off the Tennessee River in the 1940s, down a bluff. No one knows I am. On the shale ledges that slant and shelve into the water are stone seashells, fossils from the ocean that lived when fish spoke cloud shoals in the bright milk-mind of this child. ...

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