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56 SPIRITUAL EXERCISES after Ignatius Under a bleary moon, the beetles move to avoid my footsteps. An aimless obscenity throbs and fades from a passing car. We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things: the sun-faded curtain, wool sweater scratching my neck. In a café window, the dazzling side of a semi trailer erases everything for a second before the street reappears, parked cars reflected in the glass opposite. The exercises require silence and someone to serve as guide. Ask for sorrow, affliction. Instead I listen for carpenter bees beneath the porch’s perpetual light. Some night, work will come to an end for men and women and for animals. I fill my freezer with bones and trimmings. Our intentions, he says, should be simple. A bowl of pink and orange roses. Apartment blocks, snow in the mountains. Untranslatable phrase meaning something like all things that are good. The almost-wilting roses. ...

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