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T W O G R O U N D H O G S Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? —ODYSSEUS Nobody’s entrails lay out like hair. Two groundhogs dance the polka around that hair, smelling high summer wet down by sweat. I’m not watching, I’m stroking hair on a chest as broad as a Louis in Philadelphia or a John in Memphis, I’m stroking and laughing in a harp way, a glissando all the way to groundhog heaven, which is not Nobody’s. High, so high. Sony-like, sunny and lonely together, like the charge of money touching a place it shouldn’t. He took the heaven right outta me. Bent hook of pity! The hogs I lay tail to lip, connect up not pity but war—that laugh again, high, the biting of another’s rear. I shave and truss them, dead-hungry, sure hogs make pork. Pigs! The chest I abandon 47 heaves out her, the end of Sweet Slaughter, myself in the near future. Curse that Louis! Review the entrails instead of hair, believe in those true groundhogs who polka for Nobody, the wood soon dark and the dance so short, where Merci won’t mean mercy. 48 ...

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