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Some Kind of Osiris “Green” calls green into being, speaking my skin into color. I am free of song and sky and live among beetles and dung, my vast and trivial brown apartments: earth-like I lie with loam and underbrush, a dust of words in my occasional mouth watered by rain, torn pages from the book called Without Wings. Simple metals capture me, smell of basil, bay leaf, northern magnolia, every twig and shoot alloyed with laurel, laureled with mineral undergrowths. “Without wings what will you accomplish?” asks the wind, the wind’s accomplices (birds, or toxic butterflies), and I fail to reply, my fingers filled with leaves, mouth with remains of leaves. The day skilled in italics declines my nouns of wait and sleep, but I walk down into the muddy ground again, all estivation, hibernation: awake as season and oscillation, less a person 44 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 44 than a place, inclined toward or away from the sun. (I was rain and rain-filled fields, and cloudy too. When is winter nowadays, spring forth.) Then I remember I am a god, and history stutters forward, starts again. 45 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 45 ...

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