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(Opening the window late at night...)
Opening the window late at night,
there was a pretty wind out of the north
and it made me sad,
a cold, clear wind blowing
from vanished childish republics
of trees moving in the night air,
promising unknowable futures,
rivers, estuaries, seas, lands long gone by,
seen from afar but now never to be known;
It was as if I had become an old-time English fart
like Alfred Lord Tennyson,
writing poems with long, loose lines about Nature,
but for me the words did not roll in
like the gray sea
of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto,
for just moments before I awoke I had been a girl with guns
in the apocalyptic dystopia of my dreams,
joyously burning cars in the country intersections
to hot choppy tunes,
and now — now I was an old guy looking
for a place to write
and a little circle of light,
while the trees shook their branches
retreating into the medieval darkness
until they became — just trees.
Until things came to be what they have to be.
There is some kind of nail that drives through things
hammering them all together.
May this devotion be recognized by the Spirits.
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