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Page 64

Morning drizzle. Black branches
divvy up a milky sky. Not black,
but almost -- a dark, smoky gray;
can one speak of a pale black?
A wet gray-brown?

Talking about it, it sounds ready-made
for another metaphor -- network of branches
a scrawl on the sky's blank page,
but it looks nothing like writing
on a page (though seen through
rectangular windows). Even in this drear,

it's too unflat, droplets sliding
down the glass so clearly depths
nearer my eye than the varied depths
from branch to branch. Only the sky itself
seems flat.

I want to make the page evoke worlds,
not to turn worlds into pages.
Sometimes it seems I am about to tell
a terrible secret that will relieve us
all forever of the need to fill blank pages
with poems. It's the sort of secret
with which one wakes up excitedly
to scribble in a notebook at 2 a.m.,
then deciphers the next day, wondering
why one bothered. Here it is:

"Everything is like everything else,
but nothing is anything other than
what it is."

No, that can't be the secret.
That won't stop us.

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