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[12] the retrieVAL here again. the way you used to wake us — rouse us with that impatient stare. A stubborn, fair-haired, fifth-grader, you make the same requests. i say them with you. isn’t this what happens when one of us brings water to the dead? the private shift to living only sometimes with the living. eight months among the missing and you come padding back in your white socks and jeans; specter of grief we locked away before it made us more dry-mouthed and speechless than our counterparts in dreams. Grief like light encounters in a half-sleep: your moist face in a morning mirror. And how, each night you casually resume, at every threshold to every listing room, that awkward lean — the one you would do when you could not ask, but knew that we could help. your bony shoulder barely touching the wall; your right foot crossing the other. So young and old. So much the pose of one who is neither coming nor going. it’s difficult to know why we should wake. Still, every day we rise like guardians ex officio, like gate-keepers to a city of passing shades — each one a new acquaintance with your face. each one a new petition for deliverance of the innocent and quaking. ...

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