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It's everywhere.
The mystery of horns and hair.
I put on my black shoes in the morning. Blues
on the radio, fog burning off the ridge. Don't
you see it? No one promised it would do any good.
Like God, it's everywhere but some places more
than others: it has its tabernacles, its mosques.
You can smell it in old bookstores and new cars.
It likes windows and especially window coverings:
damask curtains, hook-and-slat shutters, Venetian blinds.
It loves black-and-white movies and Mediterranean colors:
Etruscan red, Naples yellow, Alexandrian blue.
It frequents all points of departure: piers, terminals,
lobbies, bus stops. It loiters in hallways and sidewalks,
knowing time is on its side. The redbird perched alone
on the longest branch of a red cedar is full of it.
The apple snail coiled in its pink shell feels it
in its slow breath as it crosses the pond floor.
You can hear it in the song of the diva and the metal-
on-metal shriek of brakes. A woman in a broad-brimmed
hat gets into a taxicab. A man holding a flashlight
walks across a bridge. Don't you see it? A white-masked
woman makes one incision and spares a bank clerk's life.
A man looks through a telescope at a comet that will not
come again in his lifetime. A woman dives into a river.
A man zips shut a suitcase. What are you doing?
Climbing the stairs to a room that smells of rosewater?
Turning out a brass lamp? All around you clouds are
forming and reforming, blown on a dry Santa Ana.
First published in North American Review. Copyright © Robert Thomas
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