For Jane and Pat Kelly
It takes so long to set up the terminological landscape,
a rise of assimilation here, wooded underpinnings
fringed by thickets of possibility there, and throughout
in a slope, an undulation falling away to one side, an
old river’s work-before one can say, “May we sweetly
kiss” or “Mark, the woodlark”—: begins with an airy
nothingness lofted, on one arc of which is a great sea and in
the middle of the sea an island, in the middle of which
a city, and mid-city a spire, the coming to point
of the tallest assumption: after this, it follows
naturally to say. “Yesterday, after the morning clouds, we
packed lunch and went over to picnic in Aunt Polly’s
orchard.”
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