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You say there are no words in the English language
For the dark flocking of your sadness
And spent eleven months at sea,
Recording what you were certain
Was the light at the end of the world.
After the winter of milk-baths,
Rooms of short-wave radios, stacked,
And your lifelong study of the saints,
You wrote me of the Accident in father’s bathroom:
The perfect slant of the blade,
And how fast it all happened.
You said you could feel the opening
Of your mind like a kingdom of light,
Then a dark bead coming at you like a black sun.
The next morning
I went up to the roof, climbed in the wire
Coop, and set your Arctic falcon free.
Cynthia Cruz’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her first book, Ruin, was published in 2006. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School.
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