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PETER BOYLE
The One Palace
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Night
of the double solstice.
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A
woman prisoner in her bird-tormented attic
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tears
up pages and pages of Chinese,
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then
filters it through the slats of her window,
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till
the sky rains
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small
white inscriptions of poems
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landing
like soot in neighbouring yards.
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I
match the fragments together:
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the
thirty three stages of heaven
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including
its usual starting point -
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misfortune.
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And,
beside it, the ample corridors of loss
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and
the bliss hidden within despair.
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And
the two of us,
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delicate
and naked
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beneath
the fine-spun sheet of calligraphy,
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two
shadows quietly talking,
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we
walked on beside the river,
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her
hand tracing the one palace,
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the
intricate curvature of the air
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housing
us all.
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