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Poetry | June 2004

I tell my daughter

By Anne Boyer

There is first the world. Moths yawn.
Four o’clocks yawn. You time
the yawn of morning glories.
I darn myself like a worn out sock.

Everything musky with moth love, bee love,
hummingbird love. I cannot omit the brain
shooting bullets of wild celebration.
I cannot omit the body’s perpetual garden.

Together we open and close.
Together we feast on untasted air.

The world scribbled half of you on a helix
before I could sing, or evoke the smell
of bacon, or praise this very air.
What about the man in the suit?

There is first the world.
What about diamonds?
What about station wagons?
What about the war?

I have read the world.
The world wrote there is nothing
here that is not a celebration:
not the man, not moths, not flowers, not air.

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