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The meaning of a strand of hair
Is not, and is not in the eye.
The words that would carriage a reflection
Slough intention:
There is nothing in that still pool--
But undue specificity,
A diffraction of seeming.

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The physiology of the heart rests on the page

And its motions are painstakingly clear.

.

In the chambering lamplight four birds flutter

To a shout in the street and the unanswering day.

.

Insufficiency: a swimmer in the ever-turbulance

Must struggle thus, but nothing more.

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It's an illness when looking at the sky
Having one but thinking of the next--
What is it, without words?
A nausea of longing
Engendering blankness.
Unperceived: the thud of a distant storm
And a horizon's shadowing flash.

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What matters is the weight of sense,
Memory's false remorse.
The pine without scent, color,
Without sharpness.

No burial nor summation
But the sun turns
The shadow of a blade of grass.

What is.
A marble with a name in a field,
And a starling's plod gait and dart.

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She is self-enclosed.
She rode the el
Mindless of the track
The parallel steel; her hair
Wind-drawn now on the platform,
Blurs her gaze over the shops
And yellow outposts
On the sidewalk of 200th street.
Indifferent in, amidst a murder of
Rooks--spectral and callous teamed--
Ether she is there, absent,
Yet the steps walk down to the street.

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A Berman film depicts
A god of pain.
.
The babe's name is milk.
And strawberries
In a rude god-given bowl.
.
And an instant of peace
With human glances exchanged
Turns god-like to death.
.
There it is done, a final
Reverent contemptuous exhalation.

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I took a soporific, as a gesture--
The bed was pale in the Greek light, slatted
Sheets shadowed thus:
An imagined blue.
Pale steps morned with dew
And a pallid sensorium.
The table and chair.
The edge of shaken conceit
Framing slap-dark American 16:9
Necessitating assumption.
==

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