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As Johnny Cash sings,
I got it one piece at a time,
Which doesn’t mean I don’t still get mixed up
Between autodidacts and automatic writers—
Not the willful, surrealist undoing of the will, but
The spirit mediums, whose hands move to some
Dictation of otherness, or other. On one side,
The weedy paths of Concord, a border of sage
Next to a field of rye, and a pond glittering
Brightest when framed through an awkwardly-
Carpentered, unglazed window. You make
What you will of it, since they did. And on the other,
The Fox Sisters; you remember, they say,
Rapping out the message of their decade;
all
The lost details of the ones you lost,
and that’s
As much them now as the dearest notions
Of the dearly departed they summoned back
From parlor tricks and transcendental musings,
Hardly more misleading than a hermit’s visits
Home for dinner, waiting while his washing’s done.
And if it’s all a sleight of hand—genial or ingenuous or
Engendering—then what does it matter exactly
When we caught on or how long we
didn’t, as
Driving my good old ’68 Rambler American, I might
Point out how much pop-riveted sheet metal and epoxy
I stuck on there, just to keep the whole thing going,
Or I might not, since what would it matter, so long
As we found our way deeper into that sun-stuck glare,
Nowhere in particular or just plain nowhere
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