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To the Angels
by Don Share
On still-haunted Main Street
tourist trolleys rattle the bones
of unreconstructed storefronts;
I feel the cobblestones shudder as
I watch a torn wisp of cotton
blow past from the Cotton
Exchange, and look at my watch
though I already know the time.
Heat rises, my hand falls,
there is always proof of earth:
one black cloud follows one white as
light takes on the responsibility of shape;
at the river’s rough lip, birds circle, and bees hive,
a concatenation of the beautifully unworkable;
just so, an hour slides, history gives way:
first the light, then the night, then the quietly abjuring angels.
Don Share is editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His books include Wishbone (Black Sparrow) and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions) which was a 2012 Guardian Book of the Year and Paris Review Editors’ Choice selection. He has also edited a critical edition of Bunting’s work for Faber. His translations of Miguel Hernández were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclán, and were recently published in a revised and expanded edition by New York Review Books.
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