(side note, I've been here!)
JOHN BURNSIDE
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I keep coming back
to the city I know from a dream:
no one at large on the streets
and the land all around me
haunted by winds
and the silt-coloured murmur
of gauchos.
By day, it is never like that:
there are buildings and people,
women with flames in their eyes
and a river of boys
who are hoping for something more
than manhood
- a tango, say,
a dance they can sift from the night
or a song in the blood
that others could see
in the slow work we make
of a lifetime.
The days are all guesswork and noise,
like the business of a home,
but now and again
for moments that don’t quite begin
a person can come to himself
on San Martin
-a person not quite
the person I might have been
and no more or less happy or true
than a stranger’s childhood
-come to himself at noon
as a waking dream
and matching the shadows he knows
with the shadows he finds
in the garnet and star-tinted blooms
of the palos borrachos.
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