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81 How He Loved Her He thought of her as an orange, so he could hold her Roundness in a hand perfectly molded To her body, and peel her, and feel her sweetness Make a mockery of his tongue, and her citrus voice Glide happily down his throat to his heart. He planted her like a windbreak of stiff poplars In the Netherlands, and waited a hundred years For this multiplication of his desire and his resolve To reach full height, and then he slalomed In and out of her like a boy running through a crowd On a boulevard, so he could know her stillness Observed from the exhilaration of full speed, So he could be the wind itself that rustled through Her hair, and lifted her generous arms, Which accepted her even as he ran the other way. He gave her the heft of megalithic Stones and travelled six thousand years backward To arrange her in lines and semicircles That no one would understand, so he could watch her Today from an automobile, and be comforted That she has indeed survived the vicissitudes Of progress, and can, even this far Distanced from him, dull and overshadowed By gorse and blue jays, move him to tears. ...

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