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- Stephen
Edgar
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These Fragments I
Have
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Shored Against My
Ruins
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I
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In
the event the disks were child's play --
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The
voiced whirr of a CD tracking back
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To
Start, the sip of an indrawn breath, and all
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Of
that discarnate archive, shimmering
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Like
hosts of medieval angels balanced
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Under
a pin, in some vertiginous
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And
slant dimension folded out of sight,
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All
that numeric memory was mum.
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More
cumbersome the clearing of the shelves,
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The
many-storeyed or the miles on miles
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Of
subterranean stack, the hangars high
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As
nineteenth-century railway stations, celled
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With
loaded racks like giant honeycomb.
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Who
saw that distant efflorescence when --
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As
after rains the long-red loosened earth
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Is
paisleyed with wildflowers -- the desert bloomed
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With
millions of wind-riffled volumes, cliffs
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Poured
forth their fluttering, paginated falls,
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The
swell a Japanese brook papered with petals?
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II
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A
different silence filled the reding rooms.
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Denied,
the glass roofs were delivered up
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To
the illiterate savage purity
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Of
wind and sky, the blind meridian,
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Midnight's
bristling star. No fiercer passion
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Than
that for emptiness and abolished time.
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III
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[Lost]
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IV
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At
length a booth no bigger than a nook
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Was
sanctioned, soon a shrine, in which two small
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Clay
tablets, dredged from the immortal sands,
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Were
set, plain unpretentious blocks, on each
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Of
which an elementary sign -- a few
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Thin
pictographic scratches -- was incised.
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V
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Day
in, day out, a steady stream of scholars,
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Students,
browsers, children, came to repeat
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In
turn, at once, the prescriptive syllables,
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Among
whom an at first unnoticed few,
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Materializing
with the timeliness
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Native
to myth and drama, from who knows where,
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Seeded
the heresy. Like Chinese whispers,
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Their
mischievous interpolations soon
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Expunged
the precept, in its sterile place
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Recalling
out of these brief characters
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Their
multitudinous volumes: "Call me Ishmael";
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"And
if ST or SK is supposed
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To
represent the accelerated force";
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"His
glassy essence, like an angry ape";
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"Rome
comprehended the fairest part of the earth,
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And
the most civilized"; "the shadow of
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The
waxwing slain"; "let down your golden hair".
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VI
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Sweet
waters in the desert flowed again
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In
age-dry riverbeds, flocks of bright birds
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Brought
leafage to the lightning-blasted oak.
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Voices
were restored to the throats of those
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Long
dust in rooms rebuilt to overlook
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The
harbour, warehoused goods were being laded.
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A
ship set sail.
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