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48 The Promise 1 The moon’s pale hand around white trunks, the shed’s broken window. Sometimes the memory of my grandmother alone on the porch steps at night, staring into dark fields as she listens to the sift and whisper of dry cornfields. 2 The hiss of a Buick engine late at night, scattering all her little dustmounds of silence. Some days, when her husband was gone, she said the attic was full of birds with stone hearts, that they beat their wings until the whole house sounded like a huge heart opening. 3 Once I thought I saw them, dark shapes among cottonwood branches, knife-eyed over the winter-yellow landscape. Every evening I carry them home for her. She counts the dead as they gather and talk softly like leaves behind the shed, loving only what hurts the young shoot, the tenderest edge of her sleeping. ...

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