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This poem I think-- probably
the story behind the poem

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is maybe better than the poem.

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This is from my kind of hazy
and strange period, when

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I was writing kind
of skinny poems

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that were more abstract than
the poems I had been writing.

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This particular poem
begins with the line,

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"If your name began with X."

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And I happened to read it
then at a reading where

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X.J. Kennedy was a guest.

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And I think probably
because of this poem

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I have two stories in
two of his anthologies.

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But it was quite by accident
that I read it that day,

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and I had no plan to read this
ever in front of X.J. Kennedy.

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So it's called "March."

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"If your name began
with X, I'd call

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it pleasure to describe the
alpha constellation, chained

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and glowing like a
radium nightstick

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you brought home to satisfy
your longing for pure danger.

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Cast iron defeat is
second only to earlobes

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on the day of reckoning blue
sky, a bicycle's blur perfume

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to last forever.

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Permission for seizures
not granted, but swallowed

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whole and beating.

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The world is blue and obvious
as your throaty scorn,

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when alien senses null
and leaning into light.

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The dancers have arrived
to spackle us with angles,

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meaning French is the beginning
of the breath that clings

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to cliffs as you sail home.

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I believe you in this air
that sets my hair on end.

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Let's go to the
sacred island that's

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always closed for repairs, so
always poignant in the abstract,

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like a festival in Norway.

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Then announce our coming to the
open window that sets our fever

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squarely, loose or shallow, as
a statue smiling with closed

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eyes."

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So I don't know, I
kind of like that poem,

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but I'm not sure I
know what it's about.