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43 Apology for Hope I Mostly the imposition of geometries, this building Home. With a shovel I imagine a shoveled rectangle for under-floor— bite by bite, the spade reveling in divot on green-capped black divot laid shingle-wise on the topsoil mound— why waste what beans can use? II And I have caused to rise joists in the jessamine air—repeats of rectangle, simplest relation for a novice: grey rough-cuts from a split barn, shaggy with age, resume in one harmonium (sort of) with the clean slender wands of soft pine they sell for two-by’s downtown. III Holes and tunnels in the salvage lumber— all homes crawl with Home, bumblebee and termite chew holes in Euclid, even thought’s bones host thought: the axes, axed open, brew with disorder, virus. Where’s hope if what takes us has none? IV Throttled in rose-thorn and bayberry, the bootlegger’s crumbling chimney, ablaze with bees. I won’t use it or tear it down. You almost, John said, seeing how near I built, have a fireplace. A house 44 burned here once, that sudden bloom drowned under forty springs of change. Their pond I go down to to drink, ripe now with algae, bullfrogs, small bream spanking green runs open in floating pollen, emerald vacuoles in silks of rainbow. The government, in the thirties, paid them to build it. I spade up soot-black, melted jars. V Here is a hill where buzzards sail close in soft blue over froth of plum-bloom. In its flank I frame slowly our great hope, the oldest, most banal, deepest, most sweet. It is what those rust-skinned roots were dreaming of when my shovel, heel-driven, made moons of severance across them, and I tore them like dirty rope out of the black, odorous ground. ...

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