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[64] AGAinSt eLeGieS What if we let you sing first? What if we look for you with Mallarme’s blank stare: birds round an empty dish, stony limbs? to tell the history of our grief we settle for an empty doorway and a maple leaf or a woman with neck curls, named Jane, changed by her poetry teacher’s love to a wren wound in light. elegies so resolute in wood or wings that we forget the truer measurements of unfinished things: the distance between two disappearing habits; the echo of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat; the length of a dreamy girl swinging from her favorite limb; the ragged patch below — our ground for spotting her. if grieving is a way of working wood, building thresholds, wrapping birds — then hands will keep us tending things too near. What if this June air should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes with the passiveness of prayer? What if the breeze that would carry a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise? ...

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